It's static, until a contractor ignores the post-it note on their monitor that says, "IMPORTANT: ALWAYS add an extra newline BEFORE saving the file".

Once that happens, you have to hope that your backups work - why bother having disaster recovery drills for a static system?

Once you realize that your backups are hosed, you may experience a creeping suspicion that software is never truly static when human operators are involved.

It doesn’t need billions but it needs enough for dedicated staffing. Many federal agencies have the problem that they’re not given general funding for staff but are given money for large contract projects. It’s not uncommon for that to be structured in a way that, say, a big project has rooms full of developers, PMs, testers, etc. but something small has like one dude keeping it going when they can find time and a stream of unanswered requests to management asking go either fund or decommission it, hire a replacement for people who retired, etc. or that the big project which was supposed to replace it is years overdue.

I would not be surprised to learn that this was the case here, too.