It takes too long to do things in the government
There’s a simple rule about government: the hard part is never the thing itself; it’s getting the approval to do it.
America | Tech | Opinion | Culture | Charts
The American government runs on permissions. Every action, at every level of importance, needs to get approvals from the right entities before anything can move forward. Agencies need to share information with other agencies; the military needs to transfer equipment to allies; law enforcement needs to access records held by other departments: in every single case, the underlying action is straightforward, but getting authorization to do it is not. There’s a simple rule about government: the hard part is never the thing itself; it’s getting the approval to do it.
That bottleneck has consequences far beyond inconvenience. When approvals stall, allied nations don’t get the weapons they need in time. Classified intelligence sits locked behind organizational walls while the threat it describes is still active. Capabilities that could help our allies fight alongside us sit in warehouses collecting dust. The justice system grinds to a halt. America as a whole is weaker.
Why is approvals such a bottleneck for such serious workflows?
Because the systems that handle authorization in the American government were designed for the hardest of hard cases. Every approval pipeline exists because, at some point, the cost of getting it wrong was catastrophic: leaked intelligence, compromised sources, unauthorized technology transfer. The rules and sign-offs and multi-person reviews evolved, understandably, to handle cases where the stakes are life-or-death.
But the vast majority of cases flowing through these pipelines are routine: the answer might be obvious, but an obviously approvable case still requires the same chain of sign-offs, the same coordination across reviewers, and the same wait in the same queue as the one case in twenty that demands real, difficult human judgment. A case that takes five minutes to approve still takes 45 days, or even months, when it’s the hundredth thing in the queue.
Take, as a particularly crucial example, foreign military sales. When an allied nation needs a routine reorder of equipment that it has already purchased, the case enters the same pipeline as a politically sensitive first-time sale of advanced weapons to a contested partner. Let’s say that Lockheed Martin wants to sell missiles to Poland, so a letter goes out on Polish letterhead. That letter goes to the State Department. The State Department routes it to another agency, or several. Eventually, someone who oversees U.S. procurement of those munitions grants approval. An export license is issued. Approval trickles back to the contractor, and only then can the actual sale proceed. That entire process takes, on average, six to eight months—just to get permission to get started.
Or take another sensitive and crucial domain: intelligence sharing. Let’s say the United States wants to share an intelligence product - a map, exercise plans, logistics, or data streams - with an ally. No one can even begin the conversation until a chain of approvals clears, because the existing authorization infrastructure, built on role-based access within a single organization’s IT environment, collapses the moment that information needs to cross organizational and international lines. Then, once approved, the process of actually sharing that still-sensitive information with a partner to another network is piecemeal and cumbersome. The architecture was never designed to reach beyond its own walls.
The same challenge repeats everywhere. Citizens requesting information under FOIA or awaiting declassified records wait years for their lawful right to understand how our government operates. Individuals seeking security clearances to contribute to our defense industrial base often sit in years-long queues to even qualify for the job they might not get. Corporate investments languish under permitting processes and opaque responses that seem to change each cycle.
Civil servants work tremendously hard; but they’re simply inundated by complexity and, in many cases, the restrictions imposed by more than a hundred years of frequently conflicting regulation. And in government, safe is much, much better than sorry. You cannot just export munitions or share classified records willy-nilly. You can’t “move fast and break things.” It would be great if you could move fast; but you can’t break things.
The authorization problem is, at bottom, an engineering problem. The information exists; the permissions frameworks exist; but what doesn’t exist is the infrastructure that connects them.
That’s where ConductorAI comes in.
At ConductorAI, we are building the authorization layer for the United States government. Think of it as “Plaid for secrets”: just as Plaid lets your Coinbase account talk to your bank by abstracting away the complexity of financial data permissions, our Conduit platform lets Agency A talk to Agency B based on need-to-know policy documents, security controls, and transparent processes, abstracting away everything else that stands between two parties that need to share information but lack the authorization to do so.
How do we do that?
Our software performs the repetitive verification, compliance checking, and triage work that currently consumes the bulk of reviewer time: cross-referencing documents against source material and policy guidance, confirming that required conditions are met, and scanning large volumes of records to surface the few items that actually warrant attention.
We’re not trying to remove humans from the loop. Instead, we want to make the loop fast enough that the government can keep pace with the country it serves. When AI handles the initial review - flagging the three items in a personnel dossier that merit a closer look, or confirming that millions of documents can be released - the human reviewer walks into a problem that’s already been scoped. The civil servant who isn’t buried under a thousand routine cases can spend real time on the hard ones - the cases that genuinely require expertise, discretion, and care. In an alpha-beta comparison, users saw roughly a 7x improvement in time to review and release.
An allied nation that needs equipment shouldn’t have to wait eight months for paperwork to clear while the strategic window closes, and a defendant shouldn’t have to wait years to know how a prosecution might play out. The government should be what it’s meant to be: not an obstacle to getting things done, but the mechanism by which they get done quickly and effectively.
The distance between what the American government is asked to do and what it can operationally deliver is one of the defining problems of our time. Closing that gap, not by gutting the bureaucracy, but by giving it the tools to actually function, is the work of a generation. We think that it starts with authorization.
We are hiring. If you want to make America’s government work the way it should, please join us.
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Definitely, and that’s sadly what some groups like DOGE should have facilitated if placed in more responsible hands. Bureaucracy is a real problem, and not only in the United States. I’d say the US is even one of the countries where things happen still pretty fast compared to the rest of the world, and in particular in Europe. European Bureaucracy needs to be studied and taken care of.