(Use four different CDNs.)
The political motivation is to portray the government as incapable of doing anything other than defense, so that the functions can be outsourced to the private sector.
Expect a solution to appear shortly after the regime changes.
Obama allocated funds specifically for satellites, but reduced the operating budget [1]. Trump actually increased funding for several areas as part of the stopgap funding in 2018, particularly for satellites [2].
There are other examples over the decades of course, but something that seems to be a trend is the specificity. Satellites are flashy and exciting and get funding from politicians. Servers? Meh... why don’t they just get a couple extra machines? My laptop is fast as hell and only cost like $600. Bandwidth? Why don’t they just get whatever internet I have at home? That costs like $100/m and the Por— I mean the CNBC videos start immediately.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/po... 2: https://qz.com/1204034/noaa-trump-signed-a-bill-that-gives-m...
The Public Cloud provides a monthly expense that just becomes part of the operation budget.
It's exciting to think about the innovation to government services as an end-result.
Ops budgets aren't infinite. In this example, if the cloud egress costs kept rising due to demand then the weather service would still have to find ways to restrict usage.