"Now, good luck getting the VA to allow us to implement it." I get what you are saying, but taking the time and making the effort to overcome that kind of thing is why undertaking this kind of work is more difficult than just creating apps. And that's why, I think, she says that our best minds are being wasted when they could be put to work addressing issues like that.

If you read her opinion about government in the article and her bio (and the author is a woman), you'll see she is a conservative, and what she's arguing is precisely that people need to take more personal responsibility for their country's pressing problems and quit blissfully ignoring them. And, no, the problems are very complex - if they were simple, you wouldn't need bright minds to take them on.

I think her point is exactly that these are problems that are "social and political in nature," and that our brightest minds are mostly writing inane apps instead of tackling them. Software solutions would help solve many of them but, as she says, doing that work is hard and doesn't offer much of an opportunity to strike it rich.

The "he" you refer to is actually a "she," or did you not even bother to read the article?