Justin Fulcher’s professional path does not follow a conventional arc. He built a telehealth company, scaled it across fifty countries, sold a majority stake, and then moved into government service, first at the Department of Veterans Affairs and later at the Defense Department, where he served as Senior Advisor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

From Healthcare to Public Service

The transition from private-sector founder to government advisor was not a sharp break for Justin Fulcher. The problems he encountered inside federal agencies felt familiar. The same gap he had spent years addressing in healthcare, the distance between what a technology could do and what a system would allow it to do, showed up in both agencies he worked within. That continuity of problem, across radically different contexts, informed how he approached reform. Fulcher joined the Department of Government Efficiency as a founding member, led DOGE efforts at the VA, and then moved to the Defense Department before his advisory role with the Secretary.

The Same Logic, Different Contexts

Justin Fulcher has described the through-line of his work in consistent terms. “The most valuable thing has simply been working in both worlds long enough to see how they actually intersect,” he has said. “Technology shapes what’s possible, but institutions determine how those capabilities are used.” That observation applies equally to telehealth platforms navigating health ministries and to defense modernization projects navigating procurement processes. The operating principles do not change. What changes is the institutional context within which those principles have to be applied. For Justin Fulcher, the shift from building companies to advising governments was less a departure than a continuation of the same fundamental work: finding systems that are not functioning as well as they should, and building toward something better. Check out this page for more information.

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