Tech people in public service

In finance and other industries there is a long tradition of people moving from working in the private sector to working in government. While often derided as nothing more than a "revolving door" to enrich people and entrench the interests of specific industries, it's often motivated by a sincere desire to serve. After all, once you have a certain amount of money, for normal people the incentive to keep enriching onesself diminishes. This diminution is offset, admittedly, by a number of factors mixed in different measures in individual psyches: fear of major reversals, innate competitiveness and mild psychopathy, and a belief in the public mission of one's own particular industry. But still, many people accept pay cuts and enter public service, and often their motivations contain or are dominated by noble elements.

I'm not sure I see a lot of examples of this in technology just yet. Tech people have given lots of money away, for sure, with Bill Gates in the lead and MacKenzie Scott nipping at his heels rather determinedly. Indeed, those two have pretty much defined the debate around what philanthropy should look like.

But I'm not aware of many tech people actually entering public service and putting their back into using the public sector to bend the needle of history in the right direction. The recent Solarwind hacks on the US government by a state actor -- almost certainly Russia -- really indicate how much we need some to do so. Probably it is happening and I just don't know about it. How many Teslas can one buy, after all? Most likely, many of them are put off by the crazed bureaucracy of government, which is like the worst old timey waterfall project management paradigm on steroids, when they have all moved to agile (if that doesn't make sense to you, look it up using the search engine of your choice). But they need to get over that. The USA will never be Estonia in regard to e-government, but we could be a lot better, and there are plenty of tech people with plenty of money who could help.