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 This is about the fact that government is outdated, inefficient, and structured in a way that would bankrupt any private-sector organization forced to compete in the real world.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:
- They ignore what the market actually wants.
- 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.
You beat me to it 🙂 Nice to run into you in DC for 2 seconds!
I think we all have to agree and pray that government MUST evolve ? regardless of who is in office and well beyond the next 4 years, we have to demand it as voters.
While I can appreciate the spirit (and I really do), most startups fail. We’ve had a remarkably good run as a democracy. What happens when break things becomes the default? As a lifelong student of history, I just wonder how long until we flame out…
Cheri Wildheart very well thought and respectful comment, thank you. I greatly appreciate this kind of perspective added.
Notice though, in the article, I went on to say like startups, plural, not like a startup, and I’m clear that it’s the portfolio that a VC holds, of many such ventures, that find success, innovate, and create jobs and wealth (which is what we want).
Of course, I agree that we don’t want to break things by default and we can’t just run government this way; what I’m pointing out though is that with sentiment about the government in the toilet as has been the case for decades, and we all know we’re all a little angry about something, we should explore or at least support some drastic changes.
The concern with merging technology and government is simple. In our current situation being completely overlooked and has zero checks or balances.
When your “buddies” that happen to run two of the biggest innovative tech companies on the planet are given unrestricted access to action your behalf and their own as well, we end up with security risks and the ability to control the government and the processes of the government.
What backdoors will be implemented for the chance that their efforts to remain in power potentially really, and hopefully fails?
Who will be able to go back and understand or investigate what was actually done?
We as a people, I still don’t understand how, just handed the country and our own futures and lives to someone that has zero interest in “the people” and with his “team” have a priority of “money”…
I agree that the government should evolve, and for 2 decades said we need to “break the system” but this is not the answer.
Troy Naquin wonderfully well thought and written reply. Appreciate it.
Yep, great concern about the crony capitalism and buddies involved but if we’re being realistic, that’s always been the way it was. George Soros before. Watergate was a complete misuse of media. Yellow Journalism goes back 100 years.
I think what we’re witnessing, beneficially even if we don’t like what’s in office now, is forced transparency. That, for the first time in history, people are getting the means to ensure everything is open record, everything is accountable… that, those are the back doors. We could never capably question, vote against, or remove, because we really didn’t have a clear clue what was going on. Increasingly we will, and just as we do with a free market, we use the media (social media) to demand change.
Very well thought out, however I cannot agree in total because startups not “a startup” do not necessarily take into account their public’s, meaning their employees(citizens). Startups do not have the interest of the greater good nor do they teach or educate people how to think. Most do not provide healthcare ir family leave, nor do they provide school lunches. Nor are they equal, nor do they even offer equal pay to women let alone minorities. You can look at the whole AI community and tech Bro community and it’s predominately white CIS males.
Are there elements that can be applied?
We are living in an age where the individual respects their community so I would say if it’s going to be a start up, it should be like a B corporation and be held accountable throughout the entire supply chain.
Why do you think itis that startups do not have the interests of greater good though? You’re establishing that the greater good is the Iraq War, the Patriot Act surveillance, the Opioid Crisis, and the 2008 bank, wall street, and mortgage bailouts, were the greater good? That your point about minorities or women is because the government obligated that women had the right to vote and that minorities can’t be slaves, or was that because the government was complicit with the human rights violations?
We can’t expect a single startup to provide all of those things, and the premise of my point was not that the government be considered a single startup (likely to fail, and therefore a very bad idea), but rather many startups… and you’re staying startups (like Google Maps, Kahn Academy, Uber, Yay Lunch, and Better Help) don’t have the greater good at heart?
I urge you to read The Fifth Risk and learn more about how the federal government actually operates. It removes an enormous amount of risk from our day to day lives. Most voters don’t know about it so they just assume it’s a bunch of corrupt bureaucrats.
Also, I recommend this recent Scott Alexander post- Bureaucracy Isn’t Measured in Bureaucrats
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bureaucracy-isnt-measured-in-bureaucrats
I will, thank you! Truly ?
Thanks, Paul. Here are my scattered comments:
1. We don’t need to run Gov as a Start-Up, but rather as a Re-Start. Start-Ups don’t begin as massive organizations in need of massive down-sizing. Our FedGov has never embraced the necessity of reducing the Federal Debt, removing any program that has ever been started, or spending less money. We must get to the bare necessities of the basic function of Gov before we can begin to behave like a Start-Up.
2. We must define the role of Gov again and stop trying to be all things to all people.
3. Government should indeed run lean and tight, like any business, which means Gov cannot be larger than a major international corporation like Exxon Mobile Corporation (61,000 people).
4. We have to stop pretending that the is a “blank check” that can be written. The only checks being written today are against an over-extended line of credit. We are spending money that we have NEVER had. Share-holder money that the shareholders didn’t agree to loan to the entitled representatives who are spending this borrowed money.
5. As to whether or not Bad Gov is only a result of bad people managing it and not bad ideas, I have to say that I believe Gov is filled with bad ideas and congress believes that their job is to make concession on how many bad ideas they will sponsor each year.
6. It’s time to SELL OFF or Close the Doors on all the departments that failed or have lost their usefulness and stop debating the losses of the decades–for example, the USPS must be sold and if the private sector sees no value at any price, then we need to simply sell the assets and close the business. The business model is no longer viable. We need to close the Dept of Education, as it has never been able to show a model of success in adding to the education of our children. It has been proven to be a failure. Close it down and if there is $50 in the budget for the Dept of Education–send it to the states. There are hundreds of other departments that follow this same pattern of failure and demise to our nation.
We must defund most of the FedGov and its bureaucracy as we know it (much of which we don’t even know what it is doing or how the money is being spent), and Re-Start a small (not just smaller), lean and modern version of what the founding fathers began–then we can begin to think and act like a Start-Up.
Great post. As always you get me thinking Paul.
In the interest of time, I asked ChatGPT to supply a historical overview. It did a pretty good job of making my point about how these united states (plural, lower case) became The United States, and why institutional change is often impossible. An aside: If you haven’t read Stewart Brand’s The Clock Of The Long Now, I encourage it. He does a pretty good job of explaining how trying to move religion too quickly might get one crucified.
https://chatgpt.com/share/679e14b5-0b68-8004-b250-ab6569a55db5
We do have a “startup framework” already in place. The states themselves can be fantastic incubators for new ideas and ways of doing the work of the people. Thing is, the folks in DC have unlimited funding, while most states are hampered by lack of money printers. So why bother trying to do anything at the state level, unless there’s specific language in the constitution* preventing the federal government from performing the task. And too often the state laws are rolled out with federal funding because of that darn printing press again.
A lot of technological advances happened in a way that allowed for the federal government to capture the regulatory high ground because of the perceived need to move quickly. In many cases it wasn’t necessary, and many problems emerged from treating tech like aviation and radio with an extremely broad brush. The Internet is also an example of fast-tracking big central systems over organic growth, even with the relatively light touch regulations. The local community could control the newsstand, but was expressly forbidden from defining standards for web services. The FCC could require broadcasters set up the NAB code for production standards, but had no mechanism to set up a similar system for web services. We’re starting to see states take action against content that goes against community standards. So far the reaction has been pretty drastic, even for the small steps taken.
And then there’s the complete failure of firms to protect user data and lack of any movement to hold them accountable.
There’s been a war going on in Aspen Colorado over the airport. Sardy field is the third or fourth busiest airfield in Colorado, and the runway is in need of a major repair. The FAA has funding available but is required to bring the field up to current apron/runway separation standards. If these are put in place it will make it accessible for larger aircraft such as 737. Currently the largest planes that can operate there are CRJ700, similar to the model that recently crashed at DCA earlier this week. The locals who live under the glide path of runway 15/33 don’t want this for obvious reasons. This fall there were ballot measures to decide if they would take the money or DIY their own improvements (at considerable cost even for Aspen). The “take the money” people won the day, because free money matters, even in Aspen.
Aviation predates the FAA. Telecommunications predates the FCC (and they predate the UN operated International Civil Aviation Organization {ICAO} and International Radio Union {IRU}). We’re constantly told that the only way to bring order from chaos is regulation at the highest level possible. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if regulation happened at the local level? Sure there’d be stupid blue laws but there’d also be a lot of consensus over issues that make sense.
Maybe it’s time to start replacing central authorities with… nothing. Let the locals (and physics) take care of it.
*An example is the AAMVA database of automobile driver records, which is set up to make sure that unpaid speeding ticket from Nebraska gets paid before you can get your license transferred to another state.
Wonderful, that was my goal, get people thinking about it (and apparently, frankly, expose the people who have such vitriol about others, that they won’t read this with an open mind ?)
Great addition and I regret I neglected the individual states > United States perspective, something I’ve written about quite a bit.
DJ Codes, I have been tuning in to an audiobook of The Fifth Risk
Some thoughts?
Lewis unintentionally makes one of the strongest cases for why government is a problem. He walks through the sheer dysfunction of federal agencies — how they’re mismanaged, how crucial roles are filled with political hacks rather than experts. The government is essentially gambling with risks it barely understands… which draws an interesting parallel to my point about startups. Seems painfully clear that he is establishing that bureaucracies don’t just waste money; they put all of us in danger through incompetence. If you without the usual emotional attachment people have to government as a necessary institution (see some of the existing comments), I think you hear agreement with me that the solution isn’t to “fix” it — it’s to drastically reduce its scope. The more the government tries to do, the more places it has to fail. It’s like a company that keeps expanding product lines it can’t manage, hemorrhaging resources while failing at its core mission.
Seriously, spot on with what I’m exploring. He also (perhaps unintentionally) makes a strong case that when government works, it does so in the way I’m correlating here (a bit). That, the best people in these agencies aren’t the typical employees; they’re mission-driven problem solvers working with limited resources and navigating political landmines (i.e. entrepreneurs?). They’re essentially founders trapped in the worst kind of corporate red tape. Some of the greatest innovations we take for granted — things like GPS, weather forecasting, and even the internet — were built by people in government acting like entrepreneurs, not bureaucrats. The problem? Just like a startup with the wrong leadership, bad hires kill everything. Unlike in a real startup, where failure forces change, government failure just leads to more funding, more rules, and more dysfunction – which is exactly why I said taxpayers need to behave like investors, for this idea to work. The lesson isn’t that we should hand everything over to bureaucrats; it’s that real innovation happens when people are free to solve problems, not when they’re trapped in government inertia.
I get why people like the book. To me, so far, it sounds more like an unintentional indictment of government’s inability to function rather than a case for why we should entrust it with more responsibility.
It’s always interesting to view government through a different lens.
Funny to me that I’ve gotten so much hate, when that’s really all I asked people to do; see how things are changing and consider that maybe it’s a good thing.
The article really exposed the closed minds that won’t accept anything that isn’t their way.
The govt is not a business but a necessary evil. Maybe treat it like that.
They tried that in the UK turning the water and rail lines over to private companies. Quality went down and prices went up.
You nailed it!! Governing like it’s 1776 in a world of AI and blockchain makes no sense. Evolution is inevitable, and government must adapt. But there’s a fine line between progress and corporate-style efficiency that prioritizes profit over people.
I’m with you 100% – Fresh leadership is needed, but power doesn’t give itself up easily. Change has to be intentional, ethical, and built on justice…not self-serving policies. A nation isn’t just a business; it’s a collective responsibility. If we can lead with kindness and compassion while embracing innovation, that’s what I’d love to see.
Justin Boger good to know. Not saying it’s right or it will work, just observing it and sharing some thoughts.
Paul O’Brien nothing wrong with a thought experiment. I am writing a book on demographics. I will send you a copy when it is done. I think you will like it
I’d be honored to read it Justin
I don’t wanna give this idea engagement hahaha. But my response is:
No.
And the 50 states already are 50 experiments in government and all the counties and cities underneath.
the Federal government is largely an insurance policy against all the failures and accidents and catastrophes that happen in this complex world.
Start ups have a much worse ratio of money in to value out than the federal government (which btw is the only reason the US Dollar and a start up has any value… the stability of it is the actual store of value).
You already know all this and you’re just being provocative.
I challenge you to think much harder what a government is for, what a society is for, a social contract is and what technology is… particularly when it comes to rule of law, justice, health, equity, etc.
Some of the things that matter most to this thing called “humanity” can’t be handled by a MVP, Rule of 40, viral coefficient and other mono-causal/mono-measurement optimized start up mentality. It’s actually OK that humanity is “inefficient”…
“You already know all this and you’re just being provocative” most, I find, in vehement and even vitriolic (which you’re not being) disagreement with me, never seem to have read the point that I make that taxpayers don’t behave like investors and as such, this isn’t likely to work. I also cite repeatedly that startups mostly fail and so it shouldn’t operate like a single startup, but maybe we can learn something from how startups, collectively, operate.
Yes, certainly being provocative, pointing out some facts that are similar, but being more cautionary than saying, “should.” “Maybe” should be that indicator for people.
You nailed it!! Governing like it’s 1776 in a world of AI and blockchain makes no sense. Evolution is inevitable, and government must adapt. But there’s a fine line between progress and corporate-style efficiency that prioritizes profit over people.
I’m with you 100% – Fresh leadership is needed, but power doesn’t give itself up easily. Change has to be intentional, ethical, and built on justice…not self-serving policies. A nation isn’t just a business; it’s a collective responsibility. If we can lead with kindness and compassion while embracing innovation, that’s what I’d love to see.
We made it to the moon and back and a tremendous much, much more.
Our hardworking citizens have been abused by mostly the Ivy league’s
Interesting take! The comparison between government and startups definitely sparks discussion.
While agility and market-driven strategies could bring efficiency, the stakes in government are far higher than in business.
Startups can afford to fail fast — governments, not so much.
That said, some level of iterative policymaking and accountability would definitely be a step in the right direction.
What do you think i
That the source of funding doesn’t expect a meaningful ROI and doesn’t behave accordingly when the government fails to deliver.
as a fellow life long start up lover… i’ve struggled with coming up with a coherent justification for why the philosophies and attitudes of start ups would work for more challenges. i’ve struggled to keep even start ups in start up mentality.
deep inside my soul im socratic meets anarchic (not in chaos, but in maximum self expression/governance). but as much as those ideals speak to me i find they require a discipline and humility that most folks simply won’t develop.
i do not think any power structure should last. i believe in ideals of inquiry and conversation and removing the ego. and i believe in institutions so much as they themselves will authentically innovate themselves to the required contemporary inquiry.
sooo my reluctance isn’t your proposals so much as my fear of half assed attempts at them.
i still believe the states are startups and the federal government with its military and dollar are the piers we tie the boats to as we experiment with our beinghood.