There is an unfortunate culture prevalent in the government sector that biases towards "buy" vs "build" to the extreme that only vendor-supplied solutions are even considered. What this leads to is pathologically bad solutions that result from the RFP process because of the odd incentives that favor private sector profit over public benefit.

I don't know the "right" solution, but the current one overly favors corporate/private interests heavily, and this has caused a strong feedback loop that lobbying allows to strive.

The deeper problem is that powerful corporate interests yield so much power in the first place and allows them to prop up systems like this that continually favor them over, say, governments developing and retaining competent internal teams that can actually make or are empowered to make the right technological decisions.

Phrases like "government waste" and such are thrown around, but even a cursory examination of the current situation should be enough to demonstrate that problem hasn't been solved and the current situation is probably worse than if we allowed governments to run more like the private sector is allowed to.

If that means the government can compete with private businesses in the service of the public, I am struggling to see the downside to that compared to where we are at now.