That's not awful, btw. The one upside of a large consulting firm is you can retain decent talent for boring projects by bouncing them around between assignments.... but you still have a single entity to hold accountable afterwards.

Plus a certain percentage of these people take the diverse base of experience and go start something useful. Teaching a bunch of smart, ambitious people about how the process actually works and then letting them go start their own operation seems like a recipe for job creation.... (and finding better ways to replace the status quo)

The trouble is that the government systems that are created are typically something only the government can/wants to do. Like "a system for issuing a permit" or "a system for quantifying the impact of permits issued". I think there is a more limited chance at job creation than you might think.

Also, in practice, contractors build a thing as fast as they can, then leave and never come back. Agencies that lean heavily on contractors generally don't have a deep bench of technical talent, so they get stuck with a maintenance nightmare that they didn't build and have a hard time understanding.

My feeling is that contractors tend to build differently than people who will have to support the system for however long the law it is enacting exists...