> I was part of the healthcare.gov "tech surge" and I can tell you firsthand that the government is willing to change.

So, you worked for a short while on an extremely high-profile project with the personal daily attention of the president. Yes, that does tend to smooth things over - but don't mistake that for a fundamental change in government priorities. There are 2.6 million federal employees, you don't re-jig politics and incentive structures that has been entrenched over decades overnight with a single successful project.

Sure, showing that it can be done is always a good first step, and I'm not saying that anyone actively wants to fail - but only just barely. More often than not it feels that a failure you can blame on someone else is better than a mediocre success (good luck running an election campaign on having reduced the number of screens in a system or migrating it to AWS).