Please stop perpetuating this lie. You can, and should expect better of your public digital systems. Don't let them use "Public tech must be bad" as an argument.
Can't call a spade a spade because of the minuscule amount of times it might be a shovel. I suppose when making the comment GP made, they have to put an asterisk to say "most" lest the first comment immediately point out that there are exceptions.
"Hey most public stuff is crap, this is bad" - Fine by me. "Don't make that public, it'll be bad because public stuff is bad" - Not fine. Also it implies the inverse, that private is always good, or at least better.
Good is good. Better is better. Private can be good, and is best for most things. Public can be good, and is best for some things.
I think the only reasonable answer here is to require the public entity making/maintaining such a system organically grow the system as a private company would. That is difficult to do with a public coffer because, while altruistic motivation may exist individually, as a whole waste will often take hold. Oddly enough, unlike the private sector, the only way to do this without large amounts of public waste is to not grow employee-wise.
Kind of a tangent, but in summary, take a small, focused set of devs, build a the system with features you want, and resist the urge to grow the feature count (beyond reason) and only grow the maintenance employee count, not the development employee count. And don't politicize it (however one does that).
There are good examples of government IT infrastructure done right (e.g. https://e-estonia.com), but the economics is stacked against them in many ways.
It doesn't have to be bad, but it almost always is.
And obviously wrong, when you consider the origins of the computer, the internet and the WWW.
You likely are much closer to your political representatives than we are. The amount of money flowing into your politicians pockets are less.
Here I expect the government contract to be unfavorable to the population at large. I expect the leading politicians to benefit greatly and the company contracted to do a subpar job that barely meets specifications.
I trust my local government, but I do not trust the federal government to be competent.
Comparing like for like in size and budget, shouldn't the larger states, eg Texas and California have good state level systems. And then the slightly small, but still well funded ones (such as Florida and New York) should have better systems?? I'm assuming that there is a lower limit for the system quality/population size trade off, where it stops being beneficial.
There are also some parts of the US government that have pretty good systems as far as I'm aware, in the military and security.
"The amount of money flowing into your politicians pockets are less." This is absolutely true, the amount of corruption in US politics is astounding.
I disagree that just being bigger leads to worse technology and systems. There are numerous, different reasons they are bad, and this is not directly linked to the size.
Instead of having a department make software, they are supported from a vastly superior group of developers that work temporarily with that department.
Maybe its too much to ask, but shouldnt the company providing the software also employ the talent that is used to make the software?
Having some experience with why government lacks organizational development competence (TLDR; short-sighted management with the wrong goals), I don't think they can do that—they literally are addressing the wrong problem—but the idea wasn't to be a silo of technical skill.