Federal agencies across the country are still running on infrastructure-built decades before smartphones existed, and the gap is starting to show. Slow approvals, siloed records, and paperwork-heavy compliance checks add friction to nearly all task government workers try to complete. Justin Fulcher, a technology founder and former Department of Defense advisor, has spent recent years arguing that this friction, not a lack of ambition, is the real barrier to progress.

Old Systems, New Expectations

Fulcher has been direct about the source of the problem. “The issue is not national decline; it’s institutional drag,” Justin Fulcher wrote in an article on institutional renewal. He added that government, healthcare, defense, and infrastructure sectors all “operate as if it were 1975.” That comparison lands because so many of the tools inside these systems have barely changed while public expectations have shifted toward instant service and clear answers.

Justin Fulcher sees artificial intelligence as one answer to that mismatch, but only when it targets the right layer of the problem. Rather than promising to replace human judgment, AI tools can take on document processing, scheduling, and routine correspondence, freeing staff to spend more time on decisions that actually require expertise. That framing avoids treating AI as a cure-all and instead positions it as a fix for specific bottlenecks.

Funding Isn’t the Missing Piece

Much of the public conversation about government modernization centers on budgets, staffing, and new legislation. Fulcher’s view cuts against that instinct. He argues the tools already exist to fix many of these problems; what’s missing is the willingness to redesign workflows around them. Compliance requirements written for paper-based processes, for instance, often survive long after the paper is gone, simply because updating them takes political will nobody wants to spend.

For agencies weighing where to start, Fulcher’s argument suggests looking inward before searching for new funding. Removing institutional drag, one workflow at a time, may do more for government performance than any single new program, and it costs far less than building an entirely new system from scratch. Like this page on Facebook, for more information.

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