One thing to remember is that governments often cannot hire qualified people to work on these projects, which means it’s less “willing to pay” than “forced to accept the only option”. If they aren’t allow to pay market rates for tech workers, they won’t have the skills to even properly evaluate proposals or validate the work being done until it’s too late – and by that point if there’s a dispute, the contract business analysts and project managers will likely be able to point to some documents they wrote as proof that “the government” required whatever problematic decision was made even when that was some non-technical civil servant picking an option they suggested without fully understanding the implications.

The single best way to save government money on infrastructure projects (software and real) would be to hire a bunch of engineers at competitive salaries so there’d be in-house expertise without conflicts of interest, but since that involves spending money up front and trusting people to be professional it’s politically unlikely.

Deloitte has really once built software that good, it is a AI / strategy / tactic type multitool AI used for the purpose of winning government contracts