We spend plenty of money on ideas. We need to pay for results. We should stop pretending government is ever going to be good at buying/building tech and change procurement to pay for innovative results. How many $50 or $100M government tech projects have to fail before we let them post an RFP that basically says do this thing in this amount of time for this amount of money with payment after we get the “thing” in time. I know an entire industry of innovative people (tech startups) who would find a way to get it done.
That approach works for buying a WordPress deployment or a Gmail license. It doesn’t for anything where you need customization, serving needs or audiences which the private sector doesn’t prioritize (the VA can’t blow off accessibility or tell veterans that they need a fiber connected-M2 to have decent performance), or provide income to a startup which needs to explore a somewhat novel problem.
The real problem here is one you see in many organizations: misaligned incentives. Government has some unique challenges but most of what you see are common in the private sector, too: some people talk like the public sector is consistently super high quality on lean budgets but for every Chrome there are a dozen terrible enterprise apps which also fully count as private sector products. The pathologies are mostly the same: internal politics, building things you won’t personally use, not wanting to revisit past decisions, or otherwise having your paycheck come from things other than what’s best for your users.
Startups aren’t magic pixie dust for avoiding those problems: most fail, and the winners often hit the same problems from a different direction - making users happy until Google buys them and cancels the good parts, having to start aggressively monetizing at the expense of the user experience, etc.
Going through the procurement process itself results in massive delays (have you tried bidding on a federal government contract?), a race to the bottom (since the government more or less has to accept the lowest bid), and massive overspecification by policy writers (mostly to try to salvage some quality from these RFPs).
Echoing that Recoding America is a great book to read even if you have nothing to do with the federal government. You might see some similarities in how large companies operate.
> we let them post an RFP that basically says do this thing in this amount of time for this amount of money with payment after we get the “thing” in time.
These exist; they are called "firm fixed price" contracts. You still have to write the contract correctly to be outcomes focused, and that can be hard when you don't know until building/testing if you are building the right thing.[1]
