Put Public Infrastructure Back in Public Hands
We call it the public sector for a reason. Roads, water, hospitals, schools, benefits systems, identity, communications, and the software that runs all of it are supposed to serve the public. Yet in practice, much of that power has been handed to a small club of trillion dollar companies that run global monopolies on compute, storage, and core software. When governments lean on those companies for the foundations of civic life, the public interest becomes a line item inside someone else’s quarterly plan. That is not stewardship. That is dependency.
This is not a rant against technology. It is a case for ownership, capacity, and accountability. Technology is now the nervous system of everything a government does. When the nervous system is rented from someone whose first duty is to investors, the body will move in the direction of the lease. If the goal is a society where people can actually shape their future, the core infrastructure of that society has to sit with the people, not with a board that no one voted for.
The mismatch
Public missions are long horizon. They value continuity, access, fairness, and resilience. Trillionaire firms optimize for growth, extraction, and lock in. Their job is to build moats. Our job is to build commons. That mismatch shows up everywhere. Procurement gets distorted toward products that are hard to leave. Skills in government atrophy because the work is pushed out instead of built in. Prices drift up over time because bargaining power shifts away from the public. Emergencies become vendor emergencies. Even success is fragile because it depends on a relationship, not on public capability.
If the point of government is to protect the commons, then the commons cannot live on private ground.
The real costs of outsourcing the core
Outsourcing is often sold as cheaper and faster. It is sometimes both in the short run. But the price tag on the invoice is not the whole cost.
First, you pay with options. Every proprietary needle threaded into a system narrows the path you can take next year. Second, you pay with time. Vendor roadmaps dictate what features you get and when you get them. Third, you pay with talent. The best public technologists want to build, not babysit contracts. If the work is never in house, the builders never show up or they leave. Fourth, you pay with risk. Central points of failure become attractive targets for adversaries. Even if the vendor is world class, a monoculture is more brittle than a diverse ecosystem.
The myth that only monopolies can do it
A common line is that only global giants can deliver at government scale. That sounds reasonable until you remember who built the original internet, who wrote the standards, and who keeps the lights on in critical infrastructure every day. People did. Public labs did. Universities did. Small and mid sized firms did. The public sector itself did. Big companies are very good at productizing and marketing and creating platforms. None of that changes a simple fact. Whatever a trillionaire monopoly can do, the people can do, and often do better, because the incentive is service rather than enclosure.
Scale is not magic. Scale is engineering, operations, and incentives. You can buy the first two. The third you have to design.
What public control looks like
Public control does not mean refusing to buy anything. It means drawing a bright line between core and commodity. Core is identity, data, standards, security, and the platforms where laws and benefits live. Those belong under public governance with public source code and public teams who wake up each day to serve the mission. Commodity is the replaceable stuff. You can rent that from many vendors under fair terms that keep exit easy and switching real.
Public control means open standards and open source by default. It means reference implementations that anyone can inspect and improve. It means a civil service that values engineers, designers, product thinkers, and operators as much as it values policy. It means apprenticeships and talent pipelines so a student can see a path from school to a real job building the systems that keep their community running.
Public control is not a slogan. It is a blueprint.
Answering the common pushbacks
It will be too slow. It is already slow. The bottleneck is not the lack of a giant vendor. The bottleneck is decision making and clarity. Small, public teams with clear scope can ship faster than a large contract that tries to boil the ocean.
We cannot hire. You can, if you make it a mission and make it a career. Builders want to work where their effort amplifies human life. Give them that chance and they will come.
The cloud is safer. The cloud is a tool. Use it as a utility, not as a dependency. The safest posture is diversity plus strong internal security practices. The most dangerous posture is blind trust.
We need the latest tech. You need the right tech. Most civic problems are solved by clear services, humble interfaces, solid data models, and relentless iteration. Chasing novelty often creates the very fragility you are trying to avoid.
The upside of bringing work home
When you build capacity inside the public, you do more than deliver services. You train people. You create local economies. You raise the floor for everyone who will ever need to work on these systems. You shorten feedback loops between policy and reality. You make accountability real because the person responsible sits across the table, not across an ocean.
You also unlock a different type of innovation. Vendors innovate to defend or grow a market. Public teams can innovate to remove friction and expand access. That is a different compass. It is the difference between a gate and a door.
A culture shift, not just a contract shift
This vision asks leaders to value stewardship over spectacle. It asks managers to embrace small teams and clear scope. It asks policy makers to write rules that fit software reality. It asks technologists to serve people first. It asks all of us to be a little more patient with work that chooses the steady path rather than the splashy one.
None of that is glamorous. All of it is nation building.
A closing challenge
We say government is of the people, by the people, for the people. If we mean it, then the systems that carry our laws, our rights, and our daily life have to be built with the people and owned by the people. Keep buying commodity parts. Keep partnering where it makes sense. But bring the core home. Train a generation to keep it strong. Publish what you build so others can stand on it. Hold yourself to the standard you demand from everyone else.
Stop treating the public as a customer of someone else’s empire. The public is the owner. Act like it.