Basically people can't get things done because they are being stonewalled by the old-guard in the various departments they've been tasked with reforming. There are outside vendors with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts on the line, and they don't want those contracts to be cancelled by implementing commonsense new technology reforms.
My friend described a process in one government department where digital documents were received, were printed, were then physically mailed to a back office site, and then manually entered into a system by typing. The contract for the scanning was worth millions. The contract for the back-end was worth millions. People's jobs depended on there being this whole useless exercise. Nothing could be reformed.
I think its important that we have optimism, but nothing short of sledgehammer and mass layoffs of government employees and contractors is going to improve government.