Dutch government has explicitly funded quite some projects, e.g. libressl and libreoffice, but compared to budgets for closed source, it's still very little.

Here's a nice blog about how the UK deals with this.

https://governmenttechnology.blog.gov.uk/2016/12/15/next-ste...

As to infrastructure work, easiest way to help and still profit is to hire one or more developers that explicitly work on a set of FOSS libraries. That way you have that knowledge in-house and a connection into the community. Also, you'll have some highly motivated employees.

I think that in the US, we've been fighting for some long about how much to cut government, the idea of proposing to create a new category of spending just doesn't occur to Democrats. The closest they can come to imagining something new is free college (which is the same what we have now [free high school, college scholarships] but more so) and free daycare (which is like free preschool but younger).

You're kind of in a bubble, there is a lot of U.S. government support for open source and most agencies use it. See https://code.gov for a starting point. There's never going to be a huge multi-billion dollar grant program because it is unfair to closed-source companies (who pay taxes) but you are imagining a debate or hangup that doesn't exist.

Why is it unfair? Those companies presumably charge for their software, and maybe will be incentivised to go open source.

It's unfair because those companies can't extract their required funding at gunpoint.

At some point the falsifiable hypothesis "government cannot provide goods or services better than private actors" mutated into the dogma "government shall not provide goods or services better than private actors."

Governments do fund some things directly – most commonly grants to specific interests – but one other area which helps is allowing staff to work on open-source projects. At least in the United States civil servants’ work is generally considered public domain so we don't have to deal with the IP concerns which many companies still obsess over, which is nice.

If you poke around https://government.github.com/community you'll find a lot of government created projects but checking those organizations/ contributors will often turn up a ton of forks of popular tools. One common thing is improving security defaults or accessibility, which are tedious but mandatory for government.

If you value this, make sure to let your elected representatives know: I'm sure they hear from the major contractors regularly.

Or companies for that matter. I know other companies that have an open source division like AT&T labs.