It's really astonishing how governments, especially the European ones, don't cluster on open-source and self-hosted resources for all of these things. To be honest, I know the "easy answer" to this: "IT consulting firms, incompetence, bureaucracy and corruption", but even with that, it should be possible to do it with open system and not just rely on some other countries even for the software.
Navel gazing at open source isn’t a great use of the limited resources of the taxpayer. There’s 100 other priorities to expend resources on, many of which have a meaningful open source component.
This effectively means that the critical advantage of FLOSS - just install it and see if it works for the users - is effectively killed by the red tape. Only software that someone actively sells can ever make it through.
EDIT:
And to be clear, this is not about customer support and whatnot. Number one complaint from most of the public servants who contract out IT services have been that the suppliers are not helping them, are overcharging them and in some instances they even threaten and withhold documentation and read access to their software databases.
Only software that someone actively supports*
On the other hand, there are very large budgets available for purchasing software with support contracts and even more so for IT consultancy services. In practice, this neo-liberal push to outsource rather than develop in-house capabilities results in all sorts of inefficiencies and deficiencies in the ability of public servants to provide a quality public service.
I’ve seen large contracting firms get the boot for pulling the let’s withhold docs to get another large change order for producing said doc. It’s BS games.