Over the past two and a half years, Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has spent tens of millions of dollars building an online tool it says will transform all social services in New York City.
The project, called MyCity, began with a splashy announcement — and then proceeded largely in secrecy, using an army of dozens of private contractors and resisting attempts at oversight. The project has no public roadmap for buildout or completion, a runaway budget, and a trail of missed deadlines. Its most-touted functionality so far is a child care subsidy portal — but child care providers and advocates have told New York Focus and testified to the City Council that it mostly hasn’t been helpful. And as money for MyCity continues to pour in, funding for the vouchers themselves is set to dry up.
Meanwhile, the agency behind the project has been given access to troves of sensitive data pulled from four of the city’s biggest agencies. That’s core to its primary function as a one-stop shop to manage benefits — but the agency’s leaders have speculated that it could also be used to track and make predictions about users, modify their benefits, offer them incentives based on behavior, and automate services using artificial intelligence.
After an oversight hearing late last year went nowhere, City Council members are calling for the agency to be audited. They’re racing against Albany, where a new bill under consideration may expand the agency’s access to data from every corner of city government.
The Adams administration says the tool is working great.
“This technology allowed us to cut through government red tape, help 43,000 families gain eligibility for child care, and support hundreds of thousands of job seekers,” said Amaris Cockfield, the mayor’s deputy press secretary, in a statement. “Baseless claims to the contrary are a sad attempt to distract New Yorkers from the truth: the Adams administration continues to deliver the services they need every day, right where they need them.”
It was a powerful idea — a single point of entry into all city services, cutting through the endless red tape — that sparked initial enthusiasm among community service providers, local lawmakers, and city agency officials. And many of them still believe in the vision.
“We do believe that the City Council and the City should do everything it can to properly and fully implement the promise of the MyCity portal, which would make life for low-income New Yorkers who need these benefits much easier,” said Kim Moscaritolo, advocacy director at Hunger Free America, at a September 2024 City Council hearing.
“I fully support the vision. A portal that allows New Yorkers to easily apply for and manage services is absolutely essential,” said Council technology committee chair Jennifer Gutíerrez.
It’s the execution that’s been the problem.
“MyCity didn’t improve anything. I think it was better before, the way it was.”
—Gladys Jones, ECE On the Move
In his first days in Gracie Mansion, Adams gave the city’s technology agency a makeover, a new name, and a bigger mission: “innovation.” He installed Matt Fraser, former Deputy Commissioner of the NYPD’s Information Technology Bureau, as the chief officer of the rechristened Office of Technology and Innovation, or OTI. And he put the office in charge of delivering a legacy project: a “one-stop” online portal for public services called MyCity.
“Billions of dollars in vital services that New Yorkers need desperately right now is being left on the table,” Adams said on the campaign trail in 2021, previewing the new website, “simply because the system for accessing them is too complicated and too time-consuming.”
The money for MyCity started flowing soon after Adams became mayor. And in the years since, private companies have invoiced OTI for more than $100 million for building MyCity, according to a New York Focus analysis — roughly as much as the annual budget of the city comptroller’s office, for scale. Nearly $70 million has already been spent on at least 43 private contractors, many of which are based in other states.
The contractors have been chosen through the city’s least transparent procurement methods. The biggest portion of the spending comes from a procurement method called a “delivery order.” These purchases have no spending cap and are often not registered with the Comptroller. They come from the city’s “master agreements,” which agencies sign with private firms and lock in for many years to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. OTI has been invoiced for over $73 million for MyCity work through these orders to date, placed with eight companies. Those companies have then partnered with other firms, which have avoided scrutiny from the city’s regulators altogether. OTI declined to comment on what services these purchases have provided or will provide in the future.
Some of the private firms working on MyCity have won hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts from OTI and other city agencies. In the past, they’ve been brought on board to do COVID-19 contact-tracing, track asylum seekers, and disburse benefits. In New York and around the country, some have also faced allegations of pay-for-play schemes, service disruptions, skirting oversight, and selling data to firms that contract with federal immigration enforcement.
In response to more than a dozen questions about the private contractors used to build the portal, planned and existing functions of MyCity, and service delivery and privacy concerns, OTI wrote the following to New York Focus: “Just like any successful high-tech company, the Office of Technology and Innovation employs an iterative and agile development process with the overarching imperative of continuous improvement, creating greater connectivity, and delivering for New Yorkers with modernity and efficiency.”
The rest of the contractors hired for the MyCity project have nearly all been chosen through “noncompetitive” awards for minority- and women-owned businesses, or M/WBEs. Agencies have substantial discretion in dishing out these awards, which skirt public hearings, bidding, and appeals. Since the city amended the rules in 2023, they now can be awarded up to $1.5 million a piece. At least one of them has been tied up in scandal in the past.
What exactly have these contractors been doing? It’s not clear. New York Focus could not identify a single document published by OTI explaining how they will build MyCity or how the money has been spent. The only material on future phases of MyCity that New York Focus found available online is a strategic plan from October 2022, which did not include a budget and showed in a graphic that the platform would be completed by the first quarter of 2024.
With no up-to-date public timeline or budget, OTI has been releasing new phases of MyCity bit by bit. Its childcare subsidy screening and application tool went live in March 2023, followed by its small business hub in October 2023 and a redesign of the city’s existing jobs site in March 2024.
“It’s like a snowball that builds mass as it goes downhill,” Fraser said of the rollout, back in March 2023.
Two years later, the portal is still a skeleton of the omnibus portal it was supposed to be, consisting mostly of walls of text, external links, and piecemeal interactive components that have no relation to one another and serve completely different constituencies. It has only three live components – a childcare application tool for working parents, a site for jobseekers, and a business hub – which each have limited capacity, and largely redirect users to websites run by private companies or other city agencies, many of which have been online for years. Two of them – the jobs and business sites – are redesigns of pre-existing nyc.gov pages.
The jobs site sends users looking for work to a National Labor Exchange page, which then loads up external job application forms. The small business hub asks users to fill out a laborious digital questionnaire, only to spit out a slew of old nyc.gov pages with rules and regulations for getting a company off the ground in the city. It also comes equipped with an AI chatbot, which, after dispensing illegal business advice in its first weeks after launch, now functions like a smart search engine for the site, looping users back into its pages of text, links, and dashboard screens. And the child care subsidy screener sends families who have recently received cash assistance to the wrap-around public benefits tool that New Yorkers have been using for a decade, called AccessHRA.
(New Yorkers can use AccessHRA to apply for childcare vouchers through the Department of Social Services, cash assistance, food stamps, Medicaid, transportation, energy, and rent subsidies, and track child support. In 2018, the platform won the Center for Digital Government’s “Best of New York” award for a mobile or wireless app. The Adams press office told New York Focus that MyCity made it possible to apply for child care without filling out paperwork in government offices; that’s true for families who haven’t recently received cash assistance, while it redirects those who have to AccessHRA.)
The digital form was supposed to make access to child care easier at a time when the state was dramatically expanding eligibility for the subsidies. But a New York Focus analysis found that even with the online system and updated rules in place, only about half of new applications submitted through MyCity since its launch have actually resulted in parents getting a voucher. The number of kids receiving vouchers is far lower than the mayor’s office had predicted the expanded eligibility rules would lead to, and nowhere near the total number of eligible kids.
“MyCity didn’t improve anything,” said Gladys Jones, a co-founder of the child care provider consortium ECE On the Move, emphasizing the need for trained staff to answer questions, walk applicants through the process, and approve applications on the back end. “I think it was better before, the way it was…. It’s very hard to navigate online.”
David Harrington, co-executive director of the Brooklyn nonprofit United for Brownsville, said his organization doesn’t use the site “because of the amount of effort it took to take each client through the process.”
The current tools appear to be window-dressing for what OTI confirmed to New York Focus is the “core of MyCity,” a platform called Common Services. OTI has published no information about Common Services on its website. The first public mention of the platform that New York Focus could identify was when Fraser explained at the September hearing that it was the backbone of the then-two-year-old program.
Behind the scenes, Fraser said at the hearing, the Common Services platform has been stitching together data and digital infrastructure from other city agencies that OTI is folding into the “MyCity universe.” It’s part of an effort to beef up the profile and dashboard screens that already exist in MyCity, fill them out with data collected from every corner of the city’s social services infrastructure, and possibly centralize benefits in a “digital wallet.”
OTI now has had access to that data for the last two years as part of a wide-ranging data-sharing agreement it signed in March 2023 with the Department of Education, the Department of Homeless Services, the Administration for Children’s Services, and the Human Resources Administration. Fraser also indicated in testimony at the City Council that month that OTI intends to fold in data from the “Health and Human Services umbrella.”
With all that information pooled and tracked in one central place, Fraser told the Council technology committee that OTI is exploring the possibility of helping agencies use MyCity to “promote healthier behavior” among recipients of social services. That could look like creating an incentive structure using data monitored in the portal to “leverage benefits in one way versus another, like if you buy water versus buying soda.”
When Gutíerrez, the technology committee chair, balked at the idea, Fraser walked it back, saying it was purely “theoretical.”
“It feels like they’re subjecting poor New Yorkers who would need access to city services to a dangerous level of experimentation at a time when they can least afford to take on those risks,” Deyanira Del Río, the executive director of the New Economy Project, told New York Focus.
The Adams press office noted that OTI is bound by privacy agreements with other city agencies and that MyCity doesn’t currently use artificial intelligence. (An OTI spokesperson told New York Focus that the office is “evaluating the use of AI technology to improve service delivery.”)
“We don’t want to be in this hall five years from now demanding a bill about transparency reports for how many times the NYPD has accessed data through the MyCity portal.”
—Cynthia Conti-Cook, Surveillance Resistance Lab
At the September 2024 hearing, the committee asked Fraser to send over a roadmap for Common Services to get a sense of how the sweeping transformation of the city’s data-tracking and social services infrastructure would unfold, which Fraser committed to doing before the end of 2024. Five months have passed and OTI has still sent nothing, according to Gutíerrez’s office. At the technology committee’s March 2025 preliminary budget hearing, Fraser said that OTI would unveil the roadmap as part of its second strategic plan, which, he said, the office releases every three years. (The office declined to make Fraser available for an interview with New York Focus.) In the meantime, the committee made a formal request to the city comptroller for an audit of OTI’s contracts, which the comptroller’s office confirmed to New York Focus that it had received.
“For me personally, it is about transparency,” Gutíerrez told New York Focus. “[OTI] is not an agency that comes to hearings volunteering this information.”
As downstate lawmakers push for clarity, their counterparts in Albany are considering a bill backed by the Adams administration – the “One City Act” – to open up data-sharing rules in the city. A legislative memo attached to the first version of the bill mentions MyCity as a potential beneficiary (as well as Adams’ “Subway Safety Plan,” which involves more police patrolling the subways).
The bill is meant to make it easier for city agencies to coordinate care and provision wrap-around benefits, breaking out of data silos that can hamper services. The antipoverty nonprofit Community Service Society of New York supports the measure, describing it in a memo last May as “landmark legislation that can improve people’s lives by furthering evidence-based policymaking.”
Senator Andrew Gounardes, the bill’s sponsor, told New York Focus that the state bill will make MyCity, and other services like it, more effective down the road.
“We should not be hamstrung by what the current limitations in this system are, and instead be trying to push the city to really adopt this more expansive, more comprehensive framework moving forward,” he said, “so that as the City Council kind of does its thing and makes sure that the contracts are being done properly and that the project is being delivered properly, and that it’s being done transparently, all that stuff, we actually have a legal system in place to allow us to take full advantage of the potential here.”
Spokespeople for OTI denied a connection between MyCity and One City, insisting that the mention of the project in the initial memo was a mistake. OTI did not address how expanded data-sharing capacity for city agencies would affect the rollout of the portal. The agency submitted a memo in support of One City that doesn’t reference MyCity by name, but discusses multiple functions that OTI has said it intends to consolidate in MyCity.)
Privacy advocates argue the bill doesn’t have sufficient safeguards to stop the police and feds from unlocking the door to the city’s social services infrastructure.
The bill doesn’t allow data to be shared for the purposes of investigating crimes. But as OTI noted in its memo, “law enforcement agencies are permitted to participate in data-sharing agreements with other City agencies for the limited purposes outlined in the One City Act.” Advocates warn that police could use the data to enforce non-criminal city rules and in use of force investigations, legal defenses, and disciplinary processes.
OTI’s current data-sharing agreement with the four social services offices already describes the possibility of law enforcement subpoenaing information from MyCity, instead of going directly to city agencies, though agencies will still be given the opportunity to file for a protective order. (The Adams press office said it has not received any subpoenas or records requests for MyCity data.)
OTI did not respond to New York Focus’s questions about the ability of federal immigration officials and local law enforcement to access data stored in MyCity.
“There is no way for people to understand what the boundaries are,” said Cynthia Conti-Cook, an attorney at the Surveillance Resistance Lab, at the September 2024 oversight hearing.
“We don’t want to be in this hall five years from now demanding a bill about transparency reports for how many times the NYPD has accessed data through the MyCity portal.”