I think that it's a problem of "outsource" vs "in-house." Government is like a microservice architecture where each service being built by a different corporation with a non-technical PM leading integrations. Then, it gets maintained by basically nobody and is expected to work in perpetuity.

From what I have observed, having an in-house technical team at the government - even small - aids all of these projects.

In fact, that's basically what this team is - SREs - professionals at running and maintaining code. A small integrations / uptime team that understands the implications of design decisions aids everything.

That's one problem, and it's a total drag. Another one I encountered was the sheer weight of the crushing mediocrity. Everybody just punching in, staring at their computers, going through the motions, and punching out to commute home. Nobody cared enough to try to make anything better, it's just keep your head down, collect your pension in 40 years, don't cause too much of a kerfuffle.

I would imagine that silo'ing all these projects in outsourced contracts and agencies really exacerbates this whole mess. It would be far better to centralize the IT infrastructure of the federal government, perhaps even into its own agency. For compliance, cross-integration, security, and just efficiency, doing it in house would make far more sense.

I've seen the distributed approach done at a university and it was a total bureaucratic don't step on my toes mess - when they centralized, things got organized very quickly.

I've seen it do the opposite at a college. I would say always allow room for external auditing. Every few set of years. To disallow for coderot and even "developermold" which essentially produces coderot. I believed the same.

I think we need maybe either a tech branch or sub-branches per branch of government. Contracting is great and all but we need consistent development not one time fixes. I'm sick of hearing about how our government got hacked here or there every now and then.