Quarterly Review
January – March 2026
Federal tech capacity decimated
Overall, the US democracy tech sector is still reeling from DOGE’s unprecedented cuts to the federal workforce and programs. Many of the teams eliminated provided the federal government’s core tech capacity. Several projects have launched to push back and at least capture the knowledge that’s been jettisoned from public sector institutions.
Campaigns
The American people fought back against AI’s appropriation of intellectual property, and new data centers became a hot political issue. Recognizing the reality for jobs and just existing in 2026, we’re also seeing new efforts to spread AI literacy.
Vibe coding
Not everyone is down on AI: vibe-coded civic apps were a clear trend in the first few months of 2026.
Independent builders, many not previously connected to the civic tech landscape, launched a bevy of civic tech apps. For the most part, they’re powered by existing open civic data (like Congress.gov). They employ generative AI to do things like track and explain legislation in more legible ways. Fully one third of the legislation trackers we’ve found over the past ten years were launched in the past 15 months.
Time will tell whether these one-off projects will find product-market fit with these product concepts where their hand-coded civic tech predecessors could not.
Local-first tech
Other groups, like Relational Tech Project and Folk Tech, are leveraging the ease of AI coding to build community-informed, local-first community tech infrastructure. The ability to spin up new software in minutes means that we can now build, host, and share our own hyperlocal platforms when the global tech giants don’t.
Connective layers
Civic AI dominated the quarter beyond vibe-coded apps too. The Civic Tech Field Guide launched X new AI subcategories based on the continued evolution of the sector.
For existing practitioners, one of the most notable trends is work to connect the existing civic data that the field has spent over a decade publishing back to the AI ecosystem.
A leading example is Civic AI tools, which introduced Model Context Protocol connectors between open data platforms like Socrata and leading AI platforms. The result is that people using mainstream AI can get much higher-resolution data, instead of relying on AI companies’ web scraping efforts. These bridges are a great example of extending the value of all that open government data this field has helped publish over nearly two decades.
AI for participation platforms
Participation platform developers are also using AI to innovate, extending their methods and models and coming up with entirely new ones. They’re rolling out AI features to help people come together to make decisions before, during, and after participatory processes (like budgeting).
They’re also exploring where AI agents can augment and help facilitate large engagements, rather than supplant human participation. The Civic Tech Field Guide is tracking the specific tech features where AI is used on deliberative and participatory platforms.
Immigration
In non-AI news, the Trump administration’s assault on immigrant communities led to a wave of crowdsourced ICE-spotting and mutual aid projects. The Trump administration’s success in getting some of the most popular apps pulled from app stores has sparked legal action arguing that they represent free speech.
Interop
Lastly, interoperability between various parts of the democracy tech ecosystem is gaining fresh ground.
Different participation platforms are working together so institutions can ‘tool-chain’ multiple solutions together.
Open social platforms based on the AT Protocol (like Bluesky) and ActivityPub (like Mastodon) are gaining millions of users while unleashing experimentation that the big tech platforms simply don’t allow.
Automations are helping less-technical users combine tools, too.
And governments are working to make their resources more interoperable, both at the tech layer and by extending national-level govtech successes to the state and local level.
Matt Stempeck is the Director of Democracy & Technology at the Evens Foundation and Curator of the Civic Tech Field Guide
