1) Our government has a huge set of rules about procurement. Who's allowed to get their bid approved, the right kinds of projects, who's allowed to manage them, who's allowed to set project requirements (different than the former), who's allowed to pay them, etc. In theory this is all really smart and awesome: you don't get someone giving their brother-in-law a swell multi-million dollar contract, physically impaired people can access your site, etc.*
2) Governments and campaigns face different incentives. Campaigns don't have many cross cutting concerns: the goal is to get a candidate elected. Sure, some high powered consultants are simultaneously angling for a new job after, but IT and most staff are relatively immune from that. Your job is to get something done, and you want to get somethng done. Government, though, has no such incentives: you can do shitty work and not face consequences, and the mission is inherently less aspirational and more shoveling shit. Much of the time government bureaucracies also double as a social welfare program, or a private welfare program if a well-connected corporation has a well-placed surrogate legislator or bureaucrat.
*Reality, needless to say, can turn out a bit different.
"One might look at this and go: Why can't we get the smartest people from Facebook and Google and from Twitter to come and work out these problems?" Johnson says. "The problem is that the way that federal contracting works is so burdensome that the only people who get contracts like this are experts at lobbying and experts at regulations that require you to get these sorts of contracts. And they're not experts at doing the job of building these websites."
This is precisely the sort of shit that make people believe that the government is incompetent. It really is for certain undertakings that require some degree of operational flexibility.
It doesn't "make people believe", it is incompetent. And, unfortunately, the very capable and competent people are working hard at making it worse by electing exactly the people who would perpetuate and expand the problem.