You're being downvoted but my work with a state government frightened me. It was amazing how many contractors are building castles of crap and then protecting them so that they can make an exorbitant living off of the teat of the taxpayer - and I'm about as liberal as one gets - AND this was at the state level.

While I largely agree with your sentiment, quite a bit of the problems with contracting that the US government has is because they don't do contracting well. Specifically, they are understaffing many offices, and they are putting not-so-qualified people in lead roles. Writing a good contract is hard. It's harder when the right staff are not in place to do it -- this is the current state of most US government contracting.

Grant programs always have multiple consulting firms that either evaluate the program or help manage the program. It was always so fun navigating the government/ contractor directives.