I want to tell you something that took me years inside the federal government to fully understand.
The machine isn’t broken.
That’s the part nobody says out loud. The dysfunction you see — the slow rollouts, the redundant processes, the programs that seem to take forever and cost twice as much as they should — that’s not a malfunction. It’s the system operating exactly as it was built to operate. And until you understand why it was built this way, you’ll keep expecting fixes that will never come.
I’ve spent my career inside some of the most complex agencies in the federal government. Medicare. FDA. The Health Insurance Marketplace. The VA. I’ve sat in the rooms where decisions get made — or more often, where decisions get delayed, deferred, reviewed, re-reviewed, and eventually filed somewhere they’ll never be found again. I’ve watched brilliant, dedicated public servants get worn down by processes that seem designed to exhaust good ideas before they can become real change.
I’m not here to trash those agencies or the people in them — many of them are some of the brightest people I’ve ever worked with in my career.
I’m here to explain what’s actually happening — because if we’re going to fix it, we have to be honest about what “it” is.
Problem 1: Almost Nobody Gets Fired for Saying No
The single most powerful cultural force inside the federal government isn’t bureaucratic laziness. It’s bureaucratic fear.
In the private sector, the risk of not innovating is getting left behind. In government, the risk of trying something new is a congressional hearing, an IG report, or a front-page story in The Washington Post about wasted taxpayer money. The asymmetry is brutal: if you try something new and it fails, your career takes a hit. If you do nothing and nothing changes, you go home at 5pm and collect your pension.
The incentive structure practically writes itself.
In every agency I worked with, I saw the same dynamic play out. Good ideas — real ones, with evidence behind them — would stall not because anyone thought they were wrong, but because the approval chain was long and the personal cost of being associated with a failure was too high. The people raising their hands to try something different weren’t reckless. They were often the sharpest people in the room. But the system made caution the only rational career move. Risk aversion isn’t a character flaw in these environments. It’s a rational response to a broken incentive system.
The result?
Innovation lives in pilots and proofs of concept that never scale. “We’re studying it” becomes a permanent holding pattern. And the people with the best ideas — the ones willing to push — either burn out or leave.
Problem 2: Nobody Talks to Nobody
Here’s something that would stun most people: agencies that are supposed to serve the same citizens, and in some cases share the same buildings, often have no idea what the other is doing.
Across the agencies I worked in, I encountered versions of this problem so many times it stopped surprising me. Teams doing discovery work that another office had already completed — at a different agency, on the same problem, with findings that could have saved months of effort. Nobody knew. There was no mechanism for them to know. The right hand and the left hand weren’t just not talking — they often didn’t know the other hand existed.
This isn’t just inefficient. It’s expensive.
Federal IT systems that can’t talk to each other. Benefit programs that require the same data multiple times from the same person. Veterans who have to re-explain their medical history to every new provider in a system that theoretically has all of it. The siloes aren’t accidental — they’re structural. And they cost people real things: time, money, dignity, access.
Problem 3: Procurement Is Where Good Ideas Go to Die
Want to understand why it takes the federal government years to deploy technology that a startup can spin up in a weekend?
Two words: procurement rules.
I don’t say that to criticize procurement officers, who are largely doing their jobs correctly within a system that’s genuinely outdated. I say it because the federal acquisition process was designed for a world where you bought aircraft carriers, not software. The rules around competition, contracting, vendor selection, and oversight were built for physical goods with long delivery timelines — not for digital services that need to iterate rapidly.
I’ve watched this pattern repeat across agencies: a solicitation process so lengthy and demanding that the only vendors who can compete are large, established firms with entire teams dedicated to proposal writing. Smaller firms with more innovative approaches can’t absorb the overhead — so they don’t bother. The result is agencies locked into contracts with vendors who are excellent at winning federal business but not necessarily at delivering what the agency actually needs. And once that contract is signed, getting out of it is its own bureaucratic marathon — documentation, justification, legal review, sometimes congressional notification.
The incentive to just make it work, even when it isn’t working, is enormous.
Problem 4: The Clock Resets Every Four Years
Here’s the one that keeps me up at night — because it’s the most structurally damaging and the hardest to solve.
Every time a new administration comes in, the priorities shift. Political appointees rotate out. Career staff who’ve spent years building institutional knowledge — who’ve been through the last three technology modernization initiatives and know exactly why the first two failed — have to start over explaining what they know to people who don’t have the context and aren’t going to be around long enough to need it.
Across my years working in federal agencies, I watched this happen in slow motion, repeatedly. Multi-year transformation efforts stall not because they weren’t working, but because the political winds shifted and the new leadership wanted to put their own stamp on things. I’ve watched career civil servants brief new political leadership on fundamentals that had been settled five years earlier. And I’ve watched the most experienced people in the building make the calculation that it wasn’t worth investing emotionally in work that might be undone by the next election.
The cruelest irony?
The people who need government to work the most — working families, veterans, people navigating Medicare and Medicaid — they can’t afford the four-year reset. Their needs don’t pause during transitions.
A Word About DOGE
I’d be avoiding the obvious if I didn’t address what’s happening right now.
What the current administration is calling “efficiency” is not what I’ve described above. The dysfunction I’ve spent my career working to fix is structural — it requires thoughtful, sustained reform of procurement rules, cultural incentives, and interagency coordination. It requires people who understand the systems well enough to improve them without destroying what works.
What DOGE is doing is something different.
Mass terminations of experienced career staff don’t fix risk-averse culture — they eliminate the institutional knowledge needed to understand why the risks were being managed that way. Slashing agency budgets doesn’t solve siloes — it removes the capacity to bridge them. Speed without strategy isn’t reform. It’s demolition. And the people who will pay for it aren’t the political appointees. They’re the veterans waiting on benefits, the seniors navigating Medicare, the families who depend on the programs that just lost the people who knew how to run them.
I want to fix government.
I’ve spent my career trying to. But you fix a house by repairing the structure — not by taking a sledgehammer to the foundation and calling it renovation.
So What Actually Works?
I’ve seen change happen inside the federal government. Real change — the kind that sticks. And here’s what it always had in common:
Leadership that creates permission to fail. The agencies where innovation actually happens have leaders who explicitly protect teams from the career consequences of trying things that don’t work. You can’t have a culture of experimentation without psychological safety.
Shared infrastructure, not just shared intentions. Siloes break down when there’s genuine interoperability — shared data standards, shared platforms, shared accountability.
Procurement reform, not procurement workarounds. You can do a lot with Other Transaction Authorities and agile acquisitions but the real fix is modernizing the Federal Acquisition Regulation for the digital age. That requires Congress.
Sustained political will across transitions. The hardest one. But it’s the one that makes everything else possible. That requires leaders who are willing to invest in outcomes they might not get credit for.
Why I’m Telling You This
I’m not writing this to impress you with my résumé.
I’m writing it because I’m running for Congress, and I think you deserve to know what I actually believe — and what I actually know — about the government I’m asking you to let me help run.
Most candidates talk about government like it’s either a hero or a villain. I’ve lived inside it long enough to know it’s neither. It’s an institution built by humans, shaped by incentives, limited by resources, and capable of extraordinary things when it works — and costly, painful things when it doesn’t.
The question I’m focused on isn’t whether government is too big or too small. It’s whether the government we have actually works for the people it’s supposed to serve. At Medicare, at the VA, at the Health Insurance Marketplace, that question was never abstract for me. It was the name on the case file.
I know this machine. I’ve spent years inside it, frustrated by it, and — when the conditions were right — moving it.
That’s why I’m running.
Not because I have all the answers. Because I know where to look for them.
This article was originally published on Ethan Wechtaluk’s Substack. Republished on TANTV News with permission.
