Justin Fulcher has an argument he has made in several forms: the separation between technologists and policymakers is not a natural condition. It is a problem, and it has a cost. The tech entrepreneur and former government advisor has spent years moving between those two worlds and has come to believe that the country pays a measurable price when people who know how systems are built stay out of the institutions responsible for running them.
The Institutional Latency Problem
Fulcher has written directly about what he sees as America’s core institutional weakness: not decline, but underperformance rooted in outdated processes. In his framing, the country still dominates the technology frontier. American firms lead in artificial intelligence, biotech, space, and advanced computing. But the institutions responsible for deploying that capacity often operate as though decades have not passed. Agencies are buried in compliance while their missions fall behind. Defense procurement takes years to deliver what the private sector can iterate in months. Healthcare records travel on paper when the information exists digitally.
His prescription is practical. Recruit technical talent into civic service, refactor legacy processes, deploy AI to improve government workflows, and accelerate procurement. These are the same interventions Justin Fulcher applied to digital health through RingMD, the telehealth platform he co-founded and led for nearly a decade. At its peak, RingMD operated across more than fifty countries, held 1.5 million patient records, and served 10,000 healthcare providers. Clients included the US Indian Health Service, which used the platform to serve approximately 2.6 million individuals across 37 states, and India’s Digital India programme.
Putting the Argument Into Practice
When Fulcher joined the Department of Government Efficiency initiative in 2025, first at the Department of Veterans Affairs and then as DOGE Lead at the Department of Defense, he was applying that argument directly. His focus was acquisition reform and IT modernization, areas where the gap between private-sector capability and government practice is widest. He later served as Senior Advisor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth before completing his planned six-month tour in July 2025.
Justin Fulcher is now pursuing a doctorate in International Relations at Johns Hopkins SAIS and advises on defense technology and national security, continuing to work at the boundary between building and governing. Visit this page for more information.
Find more information about Justin Fulcher on https://medium.com/@JustinFulcher