It would definitely be possible for government to be good at things ... in the olden days of tech development, very good people were employed and empowered at government positions with technology roles. I'm thinking back to later 90s when I filled out my financial student aid application. That was an _extremly_ complicated web product for the time, built entirely by the government, and it completely worked and was easy to use. Commercial products like turbotax on the web didn't get parity of complexity and robustness for a good decade more than that.

The 'outsource everything' 'not allowed to compete with private industry' mentalities are what has the made the government unable to function in a quality manner ... Its virtually impossible for the government to just hire some people to a team to build some shit -- instead they are _required_ to create bids for contractors to bid on and then incredibly formal contract management processes that are just incredibly disfunctional by design ...

It doesn't have to be this way -- its a political result going back to the 'small government' movement which was ultimately about proving that government has to be bad at everything by imposing rules to ensure that result in as many places as possible ...