alt Hacker NewsMy point is that "private companies abuse the government money when they can" is well-known fact. Thus, government as a customer should make everything possible to buy software on competitive market basis. If govt chose easy way to blindly gave shitton of money to some company with vague acceptance criteria and got bad result in return - this is 100% govt fault.
My point is that they are genuinely trying. I have been in contact with such people, and they are not idiots.
They have government money that they want to spend wisely. And experts from private companies convince them that they can solve their problems.
If the government employee was the expert, they would not have to contact the private companies in the first place. The private companies know that, and they abuse their dominant position by convincing (sometimes downright lying) to the government employees.
It is a very difficult position to be in. It's not about buying a car and being able to just test it. Many times the government funding goes for some kind of R&D. Which makes it easy for the experts to bullshit them and never produce anything useful.
Those who say that it's 100% the government fault should maybe try to go work there. They could truly help their country, if they could actually do better. But chances are that they can't.