July 02, 2026

250 Years In: What We Owe Each Other

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a group of people signed their names to a document that made a bet on an idea that a nation could govern itself and that power could come from the people instead of being handed down to them. That bet has been paid off in installments ever since by every generation that came after. This year marks a quarter-millennium of it.

I’ve spent a lot of my career thinking about what this country asks of the people who serve it. I spent 11 years in uniform, as a Combat Engineer with the 229th, as an Infantry Officer with the 101st Airborne, with 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, and later with TRADOC, including four combat tours between Iraq and Afghanistan. The clearest lesson from that time was that the systems that hold a country together are only as strong as the people maintaining them. Democracy isn’t self-sustaining. Someone has to build it, defend it, and repair the parts that wear down. That was true in 1776, and it’s true now.

A day to mark, not just to celebrate

July 4th tends to get treated as a finish line with fireworks, cookouts and a long weekend. It’s worth treating as a checkpoint instead. A point to look back at what it actually took to get here. The people who fought for the founding, the people who fought to extend its promises to everyone, and the people doing the less visible work of keeping the government functional and trustworthy for 340 million citizens.

That last part doesn’t get enough attention. A country can have the right ideals on paper and still fail its people if the systems delivering on those ideals don’t work. Unemployment benefits that don’t reach the people who need them. Disaster relief diverted before it reaches the town it was meant for. Veterans’ benefits claimed by someone who never served.

These aren’t abstract policy problems, they’re failures that erode something the whole 250-year experiment depends on, which is trust between people and the government they built.

Why I do this work now

When I left the military, I didn’t stop thinking about defense, I just changed what I was defending. I built Socure’s public sector business from the ground up because I recognized a version of the same problem I’d worked on overseas. Systems under attack with the people who depend on them caught in the middle.

Socure’s work in this space is built around a specific balance: giving government agencies the ability to stop fraudsters at the door while still letting legitimate citizens through it. Locking everything down isn’t security if it blocks the people the system exists to serve. Leaving the doors open isn’t access if it lets fraud through unchecked.

That’s the mission we’ve built at Socure, and it tracks closely with what I signed up for the first time I put on a uniform: protect the systems that protect people, without turning that protection into a barrier for the people it’s supposed to serve.

What 250 years looks like in practice

This country has been built, tested, and rebuilt more times than most people track. Each generation inherits systems that don’t fully work yet and takes on the job of improving them. That’s not a flaw in the American project, it’s a description of how the project runs.

Right now, that work includes public servants processing benefit claims, securing elections, and responding to fraud reports on a Friday evening because someone needs help. That work isn’t finished, and neither is ours.

At Socure, the practical version of this mission is straightforward: when someone reaches out to a government agency for a benefit or a service, the system verifying their identity needs to work. It needs to recognize who they are, keep out the people committing fraud, and let the right person through without unnecessary friction.

We’re focused on the country, the people who serve it, and the systems responsible for serving everyone else.

Happy Independence Day,

— Matt

Matthew Thompson

Matt Thompson is President and Chief Commercial Officer at Socure. He built the company's public sector business from the ground up and now leads that same mission across every customer Socure serves. Before Socure, he served 11 years in the U.S. Army, including four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Combat Engineer with the 229th Engineers, an Infantry Officer with the 101st Airborne Division, 2nd Battalion/75th Ranger Regiment, and with the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).