Insight

Two weeks ago, America celebrated its 250th birthday.

Over 250 years, we’ve reinvented nearly every aspect of life. We connected a continent by rail, put a computer in nearly every pocket, and built technologies that have transformed how we live, work, and communicate.

While so much has changed, many of the vital systems that people depend on most are in a state of managed atrophy and decay.

That’s especially true in government, where millions of people still encounter long wait times, duplicative paperwork, and disconnected systems when trying to access essential services. As we look ahead to America’s 300th birthday, it’s worth asking not only what we’ll invent next, but how we’ll build and rebuild public institutions that better deliver on the promises they’ve already made.

Every policy passed in Washington, D.C. is ultimately delivered through a mix of people, processes, and technology. Veterans benefits, Social Security, disaster assistance, health care, and many other public services all depend on decisions about how services are designed.

When those decisions are made without starting with the needs of the people using these services, the trouble begins. The consequences show up in the everyday experiences of people trying to access the services they’ve earned and depend on, and the staff who work hard to administer benefits: long wait times, duplicative paperwork, manual processes, and frustrating handoffs between systems that can’t communicate with one another.

For years, this was the experience of Veterans seeking disability benefits. Not long ago, a Veteran’s disability claim took an average of 80 to 100 days to process. Veterans spent hours filling out forms, submitting documents, and waiting through rounds of requests for additional information triggered by incomplete filings.

The problem isn’t that the technology is old. The deeper issue is that the system was built to comply with existing procedures rather than serve people’s changing needs, and this was encoded in such a way that it was painful, expensive, and slow to adapt the systems when needed.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Over the last decade, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has demonstrated what’s possible when an institution commits to putting Veterans at the center of how it delivers services. Working alongside partners, including public benefit corporations like Nava, VA has redesigned key parts of the disability claims experience and invested in modern digital capabilities that have dramatically improved service delivery. The result isn’t just better software, it’s a superior experience for Veterans and VA staff.

The results are tangible. Claims that once took months now take days for many Veterans. Appeals backlogs have been significantly reduced. AI-powered tools are helping staff process information faster and spend more time on work that requires human judgment. This year VA processed more than two million disability benefits claims for Veterans in record time. These outcomes happened because VA made a deliberate choice to focus on improving the experiences of Veterans and people who deliver their benefits. Once that became the priority, the right technology choices became much clearer.

Every level of government should be challenging itself to deliver services that are simple to understand and use, faster to deliver outcomes, and built around people’s needs. VA has shown what’s possible when government designs services around people and adapts its technology and operations to support service delivery. That mindset must scale.

The next chapter of American innovation shouldn’t only be defined by the technologies we invent. It should also be defined by our ability to build public institutions that have mastered software so that services actually work for people who live here, work here, or serve this country. Outcomes must come first.