Innovation Deficit: Why DC is Losing Silicon Valley

[Commentary] The government is terrible at building and buying technology. I know it, you know it, and the government knows it. Some of the #ThanksObama crowd will try to make this a partisan issue, but it’s not. Giving credit where credit is due, President Barack Obama noticed the problem when he assumed elected office. He has said, “Government has done technology and IT terribly over the last 30 years and fallen very much behind the private sector. And when I came into government, what surprised me most was that gap”. Essentially, that means that our country’s IT department is worse than the guy on floor three who can’t get your printer to work for more than two days. But instead of printing PowerPoint decks, we’re fighting the Taliban, negotiating with Iran, monitoring borders, building planes, and sending satellites into space. These failures represent literally trillions of dollars of waste. And you don’t have to look very hard to find them: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, FBI’s Virtual Case File, IRS tech modernization, the Army’s Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS), DHS’s Secure Border Initiative Network, Future Combat Systems, just to name a few.

The main problem: we have a technology acquisitions system built around concepts that make no sense and around companies who stopped being effective decades ago.

[Trae Stephens is a Principal at Founders Fund, where he focuses on startups operating in the government space]