It also puts the lie to privatized things just "magically" being cheaper. No, government contracts are also regularly bilked by the companies. Though I've also seen that be driven by really stupid government requirements that the consultants are telling them will waste time, generate billable hours, or just not something that can be done with current info and yet - the agencies will still really want a powerpoint based on nothing (cause the agency won't give data to make the slides) or want to do logically "insane" things.
The real problem is there are lazy, corrupt, incompetent, etc people in both government and private industry because it's a human issue. Some of the other systems are just crazy too - like grant driven projects, or really any budget things. Where the idea is - if you saved money this year, we'll lower your budget next year. So you always have to burn 100% of the budget to get it to stay the same or increase next year - so no project or agency can do "intelligent" things like save for a major upgrade, or plan for inflation, or reasonably defer a project a year to get a larger bulk discount on an order or contract etc...
Then there's issues where you have to do an RFP for something based on dollar amount, but they never adjust for inflation (guess what, some laptops are now $5,000 instead of $3,000 pre COVID due to inflation - but does it make sense to capitalize them now?) so you end up doing tricks to limit insane levels of extra paperwork.
