Helping Americans believe in government again

Section 1

The power of government

In the middle of the twentieth century, the United States built things that still seem improbable. The Manhattan Project coordinated 125,000 people across secret facilities in three years to split the atom. The Interstate Highway System connected every state in the country within a decade. NASA put a man in orbit in 1962 and on the moon seven years later. Medicare passed with bipartisan support and enrolled 19 million people in its first year.

These projects weren't flukes. They were the products of a country that had a functioning relationship between its citizens and its institutions. Americans paid taxes, showed up for jury duty, voted, and sent their kids to public schools because they believed, on the whole, that the system worked. Politicians crossed the aisle regularly. Legislation moved and infrastructure got built. Government wasn't perfect, but there was a baseline of institutional competence that most Americans could experience in their own lives.

That baseline has eroded. According to Pew Research Center polling over the last six decades, trust in government has fallen from roughly 77% in 1964 to under 20% today. Political polarization has climbed in almost perfect inverse proportion. This trend is not new and not confined to one party. It has persisted through every administration, every Congress, and every election cycle for sixty years. And it shows no sign of reversing.

We believe this is one of the most important problems in the country. Solving it requires a fundamentally different approach to how technology is built for government.

Section 2

Why trust matters

Trust is the operating system of democratic society. It is the mechanism through which 330 million people agree to be governed by institutions they didn't individually choose, fund services they may never personally use, and accept outcomes they may disagree with. When trust works, democracy works. When it breaks down, the consequences extend far beyond politics.

The effects of this are measurable. When people stop believing government works for them, voter turnout declines. Tax compliance weakens. Fewer people are willing to serve in government, which further degrades the quality of the institutions and further erodes trust. This negative feedback loop is often self-defeating.

The deeper consequence is harder to quantify and even more dangerous. When citizens lose faith in their institutions, they become more willing to support leaders who promise to bypass those institutions entirely. They become more tolerant of rule-breaking, more skeptical of democratic norms, and more open to authoritarian alternatives.

Yet here is what most commentary on this subject misses: the majority of Americans do not form their views about government from cable news, campaign speeches, or social media posts. They form them from direct experience. Millions of small, personal interactions with government services that, over time, shape how people feel about whether their institutions are competent, responsive, and worth defending.

Think: the DMV, the permit office, the long waiting time. There’s the paper form that could have been a web page, the building inspection that takes six weeks to schedule, and the business license renewal that requires three in-person visits to city hall. California's high-speed rail project is now decades behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. And we have a national housing crisis compounded by approval processes that take months instead of days, in cities where teachers, firefighters, and nurses can’t afford to live in the communities they serve.

These are not edge cases. They are the everyday texture of how Americans interact with their government. And each interaction reinforces the same conclusion: government is often slow, wasteful, and inefficient.

That conclusion, once formed, is extremely difficult to reverse. It doesn't stay contained to the specific agency or service that created it. It becomes a worldview. And a country in which the prevailing worldview is that government can't do anything right is a country that will struggle to do anything ambitious at all.

And this problem isn’t partisan. Ezra Klein makes the case in Abundance that the United States has lost the capacity to build and the left must reckon with the role of regulation and process in creating that failure. Elon Musk created DOGE to take on government waste and inefficiency from the other direction. The diagnosis is shared across the political spectrum. Government doesn't work well enough.

Section 3

The technology gap

Over the past twenty years, the private sector has gone through one of the most dramatic technology transformations in human history.You can hail a car in 90 seconds from your phone. You can manage your entire financial life without setting foot into a bank. You can order groceries and have them delivered within the hour. You can have a conversation with an AI that understands context, remembers your preferences, and generates useful answers in seconds.

Then you try to file a building permit.

In many American municipalities, the process for obtaining a building permit has not materially changed in twenty years. You fill out a paper form and mail a check or drive to city hall to pay in person. You wait weeks, sometimes months, for a reviewer to examine your application and, if something is missing or incorrect, you start over. There’s no status tracker. There’s no way to ask a question without calling during business hours and waiting on hold. In some jurisdictions, submitting architectural plans still even requires physical delivery of printed blueprints.

And it impacts each and every one of us. A general contractor who runs his entire business from an iPhone, uses GPS to navigate to job sites, and deposits checks by photo them walks into a permit office and is handed a clipboard and a ballpoint pen. A resident who files her federal taxes online in twenty minutes spends three hours on hold trying to ask a simple question about a zoning variance. A small business owner who launched a company on Shopify in an afternoon and processes payments through Square waits eleven weeks for a city to approve her occupancy permit.

The gap between what Americans experience as consumers and what they experience as citizens has never been wider. And it’s growing every year. Private sector technology is advancing at an accelerating rate while government technology, in many places, remains frozen.

This is not because public servants don't care. Most of them care deeply about the communities they serve. The permitting clerks, building inspectors, code enforcement officers, and planning directors we work with every day are dedicated professionals operating under real constraints. They are doing the best work they can with tools that were outdated decades ago. The problem is not the people. It’s the technology they are forced to use, and the system that forces them to use it.

Section 4

Government cannot fix this alone

If the technology gap between the public and private sectors continues to widen, public confidence will continue to fall. But government is structurally unable to close this gap on its own.

Local governments cannot hire software engineers at competitive salaries. Municipal IT departments cannot match the private sector salary of a developer in tech centers like New York or San Francisco, and in many cases cannot come within half of it. The hiring process itself is slow, often requiring months of postings, reviews, and approvals before an offer can be extended. By the time a government agency is ready to hire a strong candidate, that person has already accepted a job elsewhere.

The problem extends beyond compensation. Government is not structured to attract or retain the kind of technical talent that builds modern software products. The incentive systems, career ladders, and organizational cultures are designed for different work. Building great software requires speed, constant iteration, tolerance for failure, and the autonomy to make decisions quickly. Most government institutions are, by design, optimized for a waterfall approach with layers of process compliance, risk avoidance, and oversight. These are not character flaws, but the features of public accountability. At the same time, they make it nearly impossible to compete for engineering talent in a market where the best people have other options.

The procurement system compounds the problem. Government technology procurement overwhelmingly favors large incumbent vendors with long track records over smaller companies with better products. The process is designed to minimize risk and ensure fairness, but in practice it discourages innovation, rewards the lowest bidder rather than the best builder, and produces multi-year procurement cycles that guarantee technology is outdated by the time it is deployed.

The result is a structural dependency on software that was built in a different era, maintained by vendors with limited incentive to improve it, and used by public servants who deserve far better tools than they have.

Government needs private sector partners. Not consultants who study problems and produce reports or contractors who bill by the hour and have no accountability for outcomes. Product companies – companies that build software the way the best technology companies in the world build software, that can attract the engineering talent government cannot hire, and that are accountable for delivering results because their survival depends on it.

Section 5

How AI changes the equation

For years, the case for modernizing government technology was incremental. Digitize the paper forms. Put the portal online. Make the website work on mobile devices. This is important and necessary work, but always a game of catch-up to close gaps that had opened years earlier. The private sector moved so fast that government modernization felt like running on a treadmill.

AI changes the equation in two fundamental ways.

The first shift is in the speed and economics of software development. AI makes it possible for small, focused engineering teams to build complex, production-grade software products at a pace that would have required far larger teams just a few years ago. Features that took months to ship can now be built and tested in weeks. This has a specific implication for government technology: there are tens of thousands of agencies, each with different codes, workflows, forms, and requirements. Historically, serving that market at scale required either building a generic product that didn't fit anyone well or hiring an army of implementation consultants. AI collapses that tradeoff. It makes it possible to build software that is both deeply configurable and economically viable to deploy across thousands of different agencies.

The second shift is more significant. AI doesn't just help build software. It does work. It can review permit applications against local code requirements and answer resident questions about zoning, licensing, and application status at any hour. It can flag potential violations in submitted plans and route inspections based on priority, geography, and inspector availability. AI can generate the reports and documentation that consume hours of staff time every week in every local government across the country.

These are not theoretical applications. They describe work that is rules-based, context-structured, and well-documented, exactly the conditions under which AI performs most reliably. Government work is, in many cases, better suited to AI assistance than the private sector tasks where AI is already widely deployed. The difference is that government has lacked the software infrastructure to bring AI into its daily operations.This is the gap GovWell exists to fill.

Take Nederland, Texas. In Nederland, a city of 18,000 residents and 9,000 homes, a single code enforcement officer is responsible for every complaint, inspection, and notice. Before GovWell, his workflow was entirely manual: taking photos in the field, emailing them to himself, typing violation letters from scratch, printing files, driving to City Hall to mail notices, and then driving back out to post copies on doors. During peak seasons he received up to twenty-five complaints a day but could only work through nine.

After deploying GovWell, Nederland’s daily capacity increased by 65%. They processed nearly 900 violations in eleven months and now their code enforcement officer spends roughly 80% of his day in the field with residents instead of at a desk doing paperwork.

The vision, when this works at scale, is not abstract. We know what it looks like. It’s a resident submitting a permit application online in seconds and getting an AI-assisted review within minutes or a contractor checking the status of his inspection from his phone while driving to a job site. It’s a building department that used to spend 70% of its time on data entry now spending that time on the work that requires human judgment: reviewing complex plans, meeting with residents, and advising developers.

Section 6

This is the GovWell moment

GovWell is a technology company focused entirely on local government. We are a product company, built and staffed by engineers and designers who could work anywhere in the technology industry but choose to work here.

Our approach is simple: hire people who are among the best at what they do, focus them on a public sector problem, build something great, and earn the right to take on harder problems over time. Growth funds more hiring, which funds more ambitious engineering, which produces better products, which drives more growth. That cycle, when it works, compounds.

We are currently focused on AI-powered permitting and licensing for local governments. We chose this starting point deliberately.Every business in the United States needs permits.

Every local government issues them. There are more than 80,000 local government agencies in our country, and the vast majority are running on software that predates the smartphone era. This pain is personal. When a contractor can't get a permit for three months, that is a real person not earning income. When a homeowner can't get a building inspection scheduled, that is a family unable to move into their home. When a small business owner abandons plans to open a second location because the approval process is too painful, that is jobs that are never created. These are daily realities for millions of people, and they are solvable with better software.

GovWell today powers daily workflows for municipalities and counties in more than 30 states, serving millions of residents across the country. Our platform handles building permits, plan review, inspections, code enforcement, planning and zoning, licensing, and public works. Customers report reductions in processing time of up to 90%.

But permitting is where we start, not where we finish.

As we earn the trust of the agencies we serve, we will take on harder, higher-stakes problems. Statewide permitting systems that unify fragmented local processes. Unemployment benefits administrations, where processing delays mean families going without income during the most difficult periods of their lives. Visa processing, where backlogs and bureaucratic complexity affect millions of people trying to build lives in this country.

These are problems that very few companies will ever have the relationships, the trust, the institutional knowledge, or the engineering talent to attempt. Building the kind of company that can take on those challenges requires years of compounding work. We plan to do that work.

Our incentives are aligned with the public interest in a way that is structural, not rhetorical. Elected officials and public servants decide whether taxpayer dollars spent on GovWell actually improve residents' lives. If our software makes a building department faster, more transparent, and less expensive to operate, we grow. If it doesn't, we lose the contract and someone else gets the opportunity. The free market determines who thrives, and that mechanism keeps us accountable. We don't succeed unless the public servants who use our products succeed, and they don't succeed unless the residents and businesses they serve have a better experience than they had before.

Section 7

It’s time to believe in government again

GovWell alone cannot restore trust in American government. The problem is too large and too distributed for any single company to solve. We know that.

What we can do is prove that the model works.

We can prove that a private company can build world-class technology for government, attract elite engineering talent to work on civic problems, and produce measurable improvements in how Americans experience public services. If we prove that, the implications extend far beyond GovWell.

The civic technology sector today is dramatically underfunded and understaffed relative to its importance. The amount of venture capital flowing into government technology is a rounding error compared to what goes into fintech, social media, e-commerce, and enterprise SaaS. The talent allocation is even more skewed. Some of the most capable software engineers and product designers in the country spend their careers optimizing ad click-through rates, increasing time spent on social media platforms, and refining recommendation algorithms that most users wish they could turn off. The allocation is lopsided relative to where it could create the most value for the most people.

Imagine if even a fraction of that talent were redirected. The compounding effect of that reallocation over a decade would reshape what government is capable of delivering.

We want GovWell to be the proof point that triggers that change. When other founders see that you can build a venture-backed, high-growth company in this space, when investors see that that the retention is real, when engineers see that the impact is tangible, more talent and capital will follow. We have watched this happen in other sectors. Government technology is next, and it touches every single person in the country.

We are building GovWell to prove that government can work well again. That the institutions Americans depend on every day, the ones that issue permits and process benefits and inspect buildings and answer questions, can be as responsive, capable, and modern as the best products in the private sector.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy told an audience at Rice University why America was going to the moon. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things," he said, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." President Kennedy was talking about space, but he was also talking about what this country is capable of when it decides something matters enough to build.