When people talk about government being slow to adopt new technology, they often point to bureaucracy as the villain. Justin Fulcher offers a more specific target institutional drag, the accumulated weight of outdated systems and processes that quietly makes everything harder than it needs to be.
Naming the Problem Precisely
Justin Fulcher, a technology founder who previously advised the Pentagon, has argued that the issue isn’t a decline in national capability. “The issue is not national decline; it’s institutional drag,” he wrote in an article on institutional renewal, adding that core systems across government, healthcare, defense, and infrastructure still operate as if it were 1975. That framing matters because it points toward a solvable problem rather than a vague, sweeping one.
His prescription centers on artificial intelligence used narrowly and deliberately. Document processing, data synthesis, scheduling, and compliance checks are the tasks he singles out most often, since they consume enormous staff time without requiring independent judgment calls. Automating them, in Fulcher’s view, doesn’t threaten jobs so much as free people up for work that actually needs a human perspective.
Grounded in Firsthand Work
Justin Fulcher isn’t speaking purely in the abstract. He served as a senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense, where he contributed to acquisition reforms that cut software procurement timelines from years to months. Before that, he co-founded RingMD, a telemedicine company that operated across Asia, giving him direct exposure to building technology under regulatory pressure.
That combination shapes his view of implementation. Tools that require extensive retraining or introduce new compliance complications rarely survive contact with government reality, he suggests, while those that fit cleanly into existing workflows and save demonstrable time tend to stick around. Fulcher’s larger point is that solving institutional drag takes patience, not another sweeping initiative destined to stall.
Agencies chasing a quick fix, he suggests, tend to end up disappointed. The institutions that make real progress, in his experience, are the ones willing to fix one workflow at a time and let the results carry the argument forward. Refer to this article for related information.
Learn more about Justin Fulcher on https://x.com/JustinFulcher