Or in another words, you're trying to find the one honest person, in the stack of AccgemloitteBMizantPMGataBCS proposals. And everyone else is bidding with the profit expectation of tossing entry-level, over-hyped developers on it, and then crossing their fingers nothing goes wrong.
hahaha
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I am trying to structure the contract to avoid this stuff, by making the deliverables include both the contractors running their own working deployment, and the government also running their own. For the latter, there should be a tech transfer period where the contracter needs to do training and promptly answer questions, and then a government independence period where the contractor is not allowed to intervene at all to prove the knowledge has actually been transferred, and government isn't entering an IT-support protection racket. Only then is full payout given.
Yes, that means finishing the entire project will take quite a bit longer than doing all the dev work. Yes, that also means the project is riskier for the contractor and has less ongoing reward, and so they will need to be paid more initially. But it's worth it in the end.
If there is some gotcha here where the private sector can get out with too much proprietary IP or a weak and dependent customer in the government, do let me know, that is not my intent. I'm trying to envision a transitional project to get out of today's privatized world to one with better US state capacity.
Also, the fact that government jobs are so capped like that is a conspiracy to make the public sector suck, basically. We should fix that too, but I recognize it cannot be done in time, hence allowing that the design work to be outsourced.