The Government is Being Run Like a Startup — And Maybe it Should Be

For decades, we’ve spent an obscene amount of time arguing about whether the U.S. Constitution is a living document or set in stone. Whether the Amendments should be revisited, rewritten, or left alone. Whether the rules written by men in powdered wigs should still govern a nation where you can generate artificial intelligence in your pocket, get groceries delivered by drone, and pay for them with crypto you earned selling NFTs of cartoon apes.

Maybe — just maybe — we’re asking the wrong question.

It’s not if our laws should change. Of course they should. Everything evolves. The better question is: why are we still operating as a government modeled in 1776 with so much of 2025 freely available?

• The Industrial Revolution (Factories, mass production, transportation)
• The Railroad System (Connecting an entire continent at high speed)
• The Telephone & Radio (Instant communication across distance)
• The Internet (Borderless commerce, knowledge, and interaction)
• Venture Capital (Scalable, high-performance investment in ideas)
• Global Markets (The ability to trade, hire, and build across nations)
• Artificial Intelligence (Automated decision-making at speeds government could never dream of)
• The Gig Economy (Flexible workforces responding to demand in real-time)
• Blockchain & Cryptocurrencies (Secure, decentralized transactions outside of legacy banks)

And yet, somehow, the one thing that hasn’t changed is how we run the government.

We’ve rebuilt our economy, our transportation networks, our communication systems, and even our money. But Washington, D.C. still operates like a bloated 18th-century bureaucracy, drowning in inefficiency, slow-moving committees, and archaic decision-making.

So much so, that in 2025, as it’s clearly trying to change, voters, establishment, and institutions are publicly and very vocally trying to fight that change.

Spend a few minutes with me and let’s explore what being like startups might mean as a government, and while you’re here with me, keep me in check because I don’t want this to be about left or right, the current administration, or the political parties; though indeed, the last few weeks have made this rise to the majority of my headspace. This is about the fact that government is outdated, inefficient, and structured in a way that would bankrupt any private-sector organization forced to compete in the real world.

What if, instead of running the U.S. like a legacy institution, we ran it like a portfolio of startups?

What if we applied the best practices of modern innovation — lean operations, market-driven policies, rapid iteration, and performance accountability — to the most powerful entity in the world?

For the first time in history, the U.S. government is being pushed to behave more like startups. Not perfectly. Not always intentionally. But undeniably, it’s being run in a way that prioritizes speed, experimentation, and market feedback rather than the slow to turn ship that we’ve been riding.

I’ve been thinking about this and want to ensure you are too, because while I’d argue this shift is an improvement, there’s one fatal flaw: taxpayers aren’t acting like investors. The methodologies of startups work exceptionally well but only because ownership, accountability, and reward, align with risks taken. And let me point out so it’s clear, I’m not saying “a startup” (as I’ve noticed some claim or criticize); startups do indeed fail, frequently, and no we don’t want or can’t have our government failing, but we can expect it to operate more like a portfolio of startups, behaving as such, because it’s the startup sector of our economy that solves problems, creates jobs, and develops wealth. Which is what we want.

If we want a government that actually works, we need to stop treating taxes like a blank check to an incompetent bureaucracy and start demanding venture-style ROI.

Remove Yourself from Partisan Opinion, Government is Bloated

On hopefully that most can agree, for decades, government has operated like a bloated legacy corporation, drowning in bureaucracy, resistant to change, and terrified of risk. We are today seeing something new and while you might not like it, or who’s involved, we should explore and understand it: a government that moves fast, breaks things, and iterates based on real-world feedback.

This is the essence of startup methodology — and we could explore what we teach entrepreneurs about minimum viable products (MVPs), gathering user feedback, pivoting when necessary, and scale only when demand proves it’s worth it.

• We’re seeing new policies rolled out as prototypes—tested in real-time, refined based on public response, and sometimes scrapped altogether when they fail.
• The administration is obsessed with market signals—paying attention to social media sentiment, economic indicators, and even pop culture in ways we’ve never seen before.
• There’s a focus on iterating policy fast—from economic stimulus experiments to regulatory overhauls designed to meet the moment.

America, for the first time in modern history, is acting like an ambitious startup: making bets, testing theories, and adapting to reality instead of pretending to be all-knowing. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than the alternative: governments that double down on bad decisions just to save face; we can agree, we collectively haven’t been happy with it for decades.

Consider What Actually Kills Startups — To Understand if the Government is Meaningfully Trying

The two biggest reasons startups fail are:

1. They ignore what the market actually wants.
2. They have the wrong team running the company.

Sound familiar? That’s government dysfunction in a nutshell.

(1) Market-First Government: What Do People Actually Want?

Startups succeed when they’re market-driven, not idea-driven. The same is true for governments and so we can ask, are policy makers?

• Paying attention to real-time sentiment data (polling, social trends, voter engagement).
• Rolling out policies in response to actual demand, rather than ideology alone.
• Using A/B testing on legislation, trying localized pilot programs before implementing nationwide policies.

The administration should be obsessed with real-world feedback loops. Whether it’s economic stimulus, immigration policy, or foreign relations, policy being tested, reviewed, and revised constantly, in public is what we want – stop demonizing when they discern or discover that something proposed is NOT what we want or not going to work, that’s the point!

It’s not always clean. But it’s responsive. And that’s the first step to making government work.

(2) The Right Team at the Right Time

Startups don’t fail because they have bad ideas. They fail because they have the wrong people running them.

Of course, who that should be is a matter of clearly contentious debate but if you’re in the camp that we should just trade career politicians on the one side for career politicians on the other side, clearly we’re not fixing the team so that something better works. What we’re witnessing in 2025 is a government that behaves like a talent-driven startup. Agencies are getting tech founders, private sector executives, and data analysts to run key initiatives—treating government less like a static bureaucracy and more like a team of entrepreneurs solving a real-world problem.

That means fewer career politicians running government programs like they’re stuck in 1985, and more execution-focused operators who actually understand scale, growth, and efficiency.

This is a radical shift from the old way of doing things. But if we want government to work, it has to operate like a high-growth, results-driven venture—not a job security program for lifers.

Fail Fast, Learn Faster—A Government That ‘F*s Around and Finds Out’

If you’ve spent more than 30 seconds in the startup world, you know one thing to be true: failure is necessary. The faster you fail, the sooner you succeed.

That’s exactly what we’re starting to see in government, finally. Keep in mind though my thesis, not as one startup that succeeds or fails, but iterative tests and as though many startups are validating and pivoting; no, we don’t want the government to just outright fail, but we can and should want government offices and initiatives to fail fast, when they’re not working out.

Consider the last 25 years, we still take off our shoes at the airport, push standardized curriculum throughout our schools, and bail out companies on the regular, despite American sentiment reflecting our knowledge that such things aren’t working.

Now, policies are being tested in real time; exposed publicly, such as the H1B Visa debate just weeks ago. Some work, some don’t. Instead of doubling down on bad decisions out of pride, we could be seeing an administration that’s willing to address failure, scrap what doesn’t work, and move on.

This is the ‘Fail Fast, Learn Faster’ model that has defined every successful startup ecosystem on the planet.

• Pandemic Response ? Instead of rigid, top-down mandates, responses are increasingly tailored, revised, and adapted based on actual results.
• Economic Stimulus ? Direct payments, tax incentives, and industry-specific bailouts deployed like test cases, instead of blindly throwing money at problems as though money will solve the underlying issue.
• AI & Tech Regulation ? Policy crafted in real-time, with an eye on innovation rather than knee-jerk overregulation, ready to change at the pace of innovation and given the access to information and data.

Does every experiment work? No. But that’s the whole point, you can’t expect policymakers removed from the private sector where this matters, to get it right; what we can expect is that they decide, admit when they’re wrong, and change things, so that we can move forward with decisions in place.

Where we Need Attention: Where’s the ROI?

A startup succeeds because its investors, and the market, demand performance. The better part of why our government has become bloated and inefficient, is that it isn’t held financially accountable for a significant return on our investment; at best, we remove policymakers with whom we disagree, and we hope for the best that those there are acting ethically, responsibly, and effectively.

Now, American taxpayers shouldn’t be thought of as investors — we’re more like grant providers.

If the U.S. is going to operate like a startup, then taxpayers need to behave like venture capitalists. That means:

• Holding government accountable for ROI. No more blank checks. No more unlimited budgets with zero performance benchmarks.
• Social media accountability. Viral outrage has already proven to be the best way to force government action—so let’s focus it on efficiency, not just scandal.
• Demanding performance-based funding. If a government initiative isn’t delivering measurable results, it doesn’t get more funding. Period.

Right now, we’re funding government like a venture studio that never expects exits. pumping in capital to keep trying things, occasionally changing the team, and building more and more solutions, regardless of performance, value, or efficiency. That needs to change.

On the bright side, the performative employment changes evident in the recent executive orders, hint that out government is moving this direction; simply in the sense of requiring that people be in the office. While you might not agree with that policy, or that it’s the best decision, what it reveals is that the government is expecting more accountability of the team.

America as a High-Performance Startup: What Comes Next?

Right or left, Republican or Democrat, we all agree on one thing: government doesn’t work the way it could and perhaps should.

But for the first time, we’re seeing a model that makes some sense for an information age era; startup methodologies implementing policymaking and market-driven solutions, focus on the team, and failing fast to find success.

We need to fund it like a high-growth startup—demanding returns, cutting waste, and rewarding success.