[gunsch]

I replied to your other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25975825 about that exact question!

One weird thing we've discovered working on VA.gov for the last five years is that we on the contractor side actually have retained a lot more institutional knowledge than the VA has. It's a problem! We think that knowledge should be on the government side, but the structure isn't there yet: USDS and 18F have rotational term limits that keep people moving through, and at the VA (not sure about other agencies) they're just in the last couple years building out an organization to do that long-term product ownership and institutional knowledge retention, even if implementation teams come through. It's moving in the right direction but it's slow, large-organization change, with a lot of extra slowness that's unique to government.