Most technology founders who engage with government do so from a distance. They advise. They testify. They build products for federal clients and navigate the procurement process from the outside. A smaller number step inside, taking on operational roles inside public institutions with real mandates and real accountability.
Justin Fulcher is one of the latter. As a founding member of the Department of Government Efficiency under President Trump, he led DOGE efforts first at the Department of Veterans Affairs and then at the Defense Department, before being promoted to Senior Advisor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. He held that role until his planned departure in July 2025. Two agencies, six months, and operational responsibility inside some of America’s most complex institutions.
What that crossing produces – not what government can learn from founders, but what founders learn from government – is a less commonly examined question. The specific answer, in Fulcher’s case, concerns how public institutions recalibrate a founder’s relationship to consequence, restraint, and what it actually takes to build technology that functions inside systems designed for public accountability rather than market competition.
You Can’t Audit Your Way to Understanding an Institution
When Justin Fulcher arrived at the Department of Veterans Affairs, he did something that distinguished him from many reform-minded outsiders: he listened first. Bloomberg, covering his early work there, described his approach as notably methodical – interviewing staff about how the agency could be improved, reviewing programs, asking questions before drawing any conclusions. Those who interacted with him recalled positive conversations. He won early accolades from people inside an institution that had every reason to be cautious about yet another external reformer arriving with a mandate.
The approach reflected how Fulcher has always entered unfamiliar operating environments, whether a new healthcare market in Southeast Asia or a federal agency in Washington.
“The people who work inside these institutions every day carry knowledge that no briefing document captures,” he has said. “Most are incredibly hardworking and mission-driven. They know where the real bottlenecks are. They know which processes exist on paper and which ones actually govern how decisions get made. That’s not something you learn from the outside. You have to go find it.”
For founders accustomed to moving fast and iterating in public, that discipline can feel counterintuitive. The startup environment rewards decisive action and visible momentum. Public institutions (particularly ones serving veterans, service members, and communities with no alternative) reward decisions grounded in operational reality rather than external assumptions. Founders who make that adjustment tend to produce outcomes that hold. Founders who don’t tend to make changes that look significant on paper and prove fragile in practice, because they were designed around a picture of the institution that wasn’t accurate.
The Constraint Isn’t Speed; It’s Consequence
The most common misreading that technology founders bring into public service is that the central problem is pace. Government moves slowly, the argument goes, and the solution is to move faster. Fulcher’s experience produced a different diagnosis.
“The real constraint in government isn’t speed,” he has said. “It’s consequence. In a startup, a wrong call lands on a small team in a fast feedback loop. In government, it lands on people who didn’t choose to be in the experiment and may have no alternative. That changes how you think about judgment.”
That recalibration is not a reason for paralysis. Fulcher’s career across regulated environments – scaling telehealth services across fifty countries, navigating procurement frameworks and clinical compliance regimes simultaneously – had already trained him to make decisions under genuine uncertainty without waiting for conditions that would never arrive. That discipline transferred directly.
What public service added was a different relationship to error. Startups survive by treating a bad result as information: ship, observe, correct. That cycle works when the feedback is fast and the downside falls on the team that made the call. Inside federal agencies, a poor decision affecting veterans’ care or defense procurement plays out across millions of people over years, and reversing it requires navigating the same institutional machinery that produced it. The private sector rarely places a founder inside that dynamic long enough for it to change how they think. Six months of operational responsibility inside two major federal agencies does.
Restraint as a Skill
Fulcher has been consistent, across everything he has said about his time in Washington, in framing public service as an obligation rather than an opportunity.
“Public service is not about visibility,” he has said. “It is about stewardship.” And elsewhere: “Proximity to institutions increases responsibility. Influence without restraint is a liability, not an asset.”
Those commitments describe a specific way of operating – one that the startup environment tends to select against. Early-stage companies reward founders who move aggressively, communicate loudly, and treat conviction as a competitive advantage. Fulcher’s view of what serious institutions require is the opposite: “judgment, preparation, and people who understand what’s at stake.”
What public service teaches, and what few other environments teach as directly, is the discipline of understanding what you are changing before you change it.
The processes and structures of a large federal agency are not simply inertia to overcome. They are the accumulated record of what the institution has had to absorb – legal constraints, congressional oversight, the operational requirements of serving populations with no fallback option. Founders who treat that weight as an obstacle to work around tend to produce changes that the institution quietly reverses once the external pressure is gone. Founders who take the time to understand it can identify which parts of the system can actually be moved and which ones cannot.
“Every founder eventually goes to war,” Fulcher has written. “The ones who endure are not the ones who deny it, nor the ones who relish it. They are the ones who understand the terrain and move through it without illusion.”
That principle, developed across years of building in difficult markets, sharpened inside government. The terrain of a federal agency differs from a Southeast Asian healthcare market or a FedRAMP compliance regime, but the requirement to read it accurately before acting is identical.
What It Changes About How You Build?
The more durable question isn’t what public service teaches founders while they’re inside it. It’s what they carry back out.
For Fulcher, the practical answer centers on how he thinks about technology adoption in regulated environments. His stated principle – that technology adoption in regulated environments succeeds when it reduces existing friction rather than creating new complexity – predates his government service. But working inside federal procurement and compliance systems (as part of his broader work on defense technology and national security modernization) tested it against conditions more demanding than anything a private-sector client relationship produces.
“After six months inside federal institutions, I think differently about what it means to design for adoption,” he has said. “Building for a consumer market is a very different problem from building something that has to operate inside a procurement system, a compliance regime, and an accountability structure simultaneously. That experience changes what you notice when you’re advising on product.”
The specific work he contributed to at the Defense Department – acquisition reform and IT modernization, including initiatives that compressed software procurement timelines from years to months – illustrates what that looks like in practice. Core systems operate on outdated processes, not because the technology isn’t available but because the institutional drag around procurement, compliance, and workflow assumptions has never been systematically addressed. Artificial intelligence is now running directly into that same structure across government: capable tools meeting approval processes and data architectures built for a different era.
The founders best positioned to contribute to that problem are the ones who understand federal institutions from the inside. This includes understanding how decisions move through these institutions, where accountability actually sits, and what it takes for a new system to survive long enough to prove its value. That understanding is not available from a vendor relationship or an advisory role. It comes from working alongside the dedicated men and women of those institutions, inside the constraints that govern what they can and cannot do, long enough to see how the system actually functions under operational pressure.
What the Private Sector Can’t Teach You?
Justin Fulcher’s argument for founders spending time in public service is grounded in what the experience produced for him as an operator, not in an abstract case for civic participation.
The startup environment trains founders well for a specific set of challenges: making decisions under uncertainty, moving through institutional resistance, building products that have to earn adoption in environments that weren’t designed to receive them. Those skills are useful inside government. They are not sufficient on their own.
Founders who enter public service without adjusting for the difference in stakes tend to apply private-sector instincts: move fast, treat resistance as a problem to overcome, and optimize for visible output. But they’re applying those instincts in contexts where they’ll produce the wrong results. Career civil servants inside large agencies have seen that pattern before. The credibility gap it creates is real, and it closes slowly.
What public service adds is harder to acquire elsewhere: a direct, operational understanding of how federal institutions actually function. Not how they are described in policy documents, but how decisions are made, where they slow down, and what kinds of change the system will and won’t absorb. For a technology founder whose subsequent work involves advising on defense technology and national security modernization, that’s not background knowledge. It’s central to the work.
“Each of us has a role to play in the ongoing story of our nation,” Fulcher has said. “To serve with courage, and to contribute in whatever way we can to the enduring story of America.”
“As planned, I’ve completed six months of public service to my country,” he said in his departure statement. “Still, this is just the beginning.”
For Justin Fulcher, the six months in Washington were not a detour from his career as a technology founder and advisor. They were an addition to it – one that changed what he understands about the systems he now works to improve.
