79¢of every federal IT dollar keeps old systems running
About $83 billion in 2025. Some of those systems are 23 to 60 years old.
GAO-25-107795, July 2025
Why We Exist
Americans have always gone further than anyone thought they could.
Our public institutions should get to do the same. Most of them can’t right now. The people inside them are not the reason.
You Already Feel It
- You wait on hold with an agency or department.
- You type the same facts into three different forms.
- A government website won’t work on your phone.
- So you drive to an office and stand in line.
- And the bill keeps growing.
Those headaches share a cause.
The money is already going out the door. It just buys standing still.
The System Was Not Built for This
The people who run it are light on resources and heavy on responsibility. Replacing an old system is a second full-time job, and nobody gives them the hours.
The rules make it harder
Budgets reward spending by year’s end, not saving.
Buying rules make trying something new slow and risky.
Drawn FirstYou pay for the house.
Decided on SiteYou pay for the hours.
Think of It This Way
It is like building your dream house with no drawings. You pay by the hour, not for the house, and the contract can’t help, because it never said what you were buying.
So much of public sector technology is bought this way.
When You Can’t Judge It, Someone Else Will
An agency that can’t judge what it buys will struggle to judge the rules it writes. So the companies already in the room write them.
Fear is the easiest tool. Call a newcomer a danger, and a locked door sounds like safety. Much of that worry is sincere. Some is stirred up by those who gain when the door stays shut.
The waste and the locked doors come from the same gap. An agency that can judge for itself is harder to overcharge and harder to scare.
What We Believe
Three rights: your person, your liberty, your property. Everything below follows from protecting them.
After Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, 1850
- Freedom Comes with ResponsibilityTake the risk, own the result. Harm someone, and you answer for it. People and companies alike.
- Open Is the DefaultRegulation comes last, for when lawsuits, contracts, courts, and competition cannot handle a real harm.
We do not want a bigger government. We want more value from the one we already pay for.
We turn research into tools anyone can use, so no one solves the same problem fifty times.