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.