It doesn’t need billions but it needs enough for dedicated staffing. Many federal agencies have the problem that they’re not given general funding for staff but are given money for large contract projects. It’s not uncommon for that to be structured in a way that, say, a big project has rooms full of developers, PMs, testers, etc. but something small has like one dude keeping it going when they can find time and a stream of unanswered requests to management asking go either fund or decommission it, hire a replacement for people who retired, etc. or that the big project which was supposed to replace it is years overdue.

I would not be surprised to learn that this was the case here, too.