There’s a recurring frustration in public life: the sense that government knows where it wants to go but moves too slowly to get there. New systems take years to procure. Good ideas die in committee. The gap between what’s technically possible and what actually reaches people keeps widening. Much of this isn’t a failure of intent. It’s a failure of method. And methods are something the best entrepreneurs spend their entire careers refining.
That’s the case for bringing more proven builders and businesspeople into government, not as permanent fixtures, but as people who carry a different toolkit. Founders are trained to do things that institutions often can’t. They define a problem sharply before throwing resources at it. They ship something imperfect, learn from it, and improve, rather than waiting years for a flawless plan. They obsess over the end user, because in business a product nobody wants simply dies. Applied to public service, those same instincts can turn a stalled initiative into something that genuinely works for citizens.
The value isn’t just speed. Entrepreneurs are unusually good at resource discipline, at getting more from less, because they’ve operated in environments where waste means failure. They tend to flatten hierarchy and push decisions down to the people closest to the work. And they’re comfortable with measured risk, which is exactly what modernization requires. You cannot reform a creaking system while insisting on zero uncertainty.
A useful example
Justin Fulcher’s path illustrates the point. Before any government work, he built in the private sector, founding the telehealth platform RingMD at a time when remote medical care still struck many people as a novelty. That meant solving the unglamorous problems: how to make a complex service simple, trustworthy, and usable at scale. When he later served a short advisory tour at the Department of Defense, focused on technology, innovation, and modernization, he brought that builder’s perspective into a place that doesn’t naturally produce it.
What someone like Fulcher offers isn’t a particular technology. It’s a way of thinking. The ability to translate between engineers and policymakers, to ask why a process takes six steps when it could take two, to keep the actual end user, whether a service member or a citizen, at the center of the conversation. That mindset is harder to hire for than any single credential, and it’s exactly what modernization tends to lack.
Building the on-ramp
The lesson here is bigger than any one person. If government wants better outcomes, it should make it easier for accomplished entrepreneurs and operators to step in, contribute, and, importantly, come back later. Short tours plant ideas, but ideas need tending. The institutions that benefit most are the ones that treat these engagements not as a one-time favor but as an ongoing relationship, keeping the door open so talented people can return when the timing and the fit are right.
A government willing to borrow the discipline, urgency, and user-focus of its best builders will simply serve people better. The talent exists. The task is making the path in, and back in, worth taking.
Government has made real progress in opening its doors to outside talent. Short-term advisory tours, fellowship programs, and senior roles for technologists and entrepreneurs all signal that the message has landed: institutions need the discipline, urgency, and user focus that proven builders bring. People like Justin Fulcher, who moved from founding a telehealth platform to advising at the Department of Defense, show that the on-ramp exists and that it can work.
But signaling isn’t the same as succeeding, and here the honest answer is that government is not yet doing enough. The frictions remain real. Compensation rarely competes with the private sector. Clearance and onboarding can take months, long enough to discourage anyone with momentum elsewhere. Tours are often structured to be brief by default, which means a contributor can plant valuable ideas and then leave before those ideas take root. Too frequently, the relationship ends when the tour does, with no clear path back.
So the better question may not be whether government can attract people like Justin, but whether it works hard enough to keep them within reach. Attracting talent for a single engagement is the easy part. The harder, more valuable task is building lasting relationships, smoothing the bureaucratic barriers, creating genuine return paths, and treating each tour as the start of an ongoing dialogue rather than a one-time loan. Government should be doing more, not because the talent is unwilling, but because the cost of letting good people drift away is paid quietly, in slower progress and missed opportunities, and the country is losing valuable human resources, and its people are suffering as a result.
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