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Part of the problem with the acquisition process is the number of people with their finger in the pie. It's very easy to propose and implement new procedures/regulations that add additional gatekeepers to any project. Creating new procedures and being a gatekeeper is viewed as important and it helps the careers of those who behave that way.

New procedures generally have risk-reduction as part of their justification. For gov employees, if you take a risk, and it pays off, it doesn't help your career. If you take a risk, and it doesn't pay off, you're in trouble for going outside procedure. If you don't take a risk, no one will punish you even if things fail, because you can place all the blame onto the procedure.

For this reason, there are almost no bureaucrats who will reduce the number of procedures or regulations. Doing so is a risk, and if something bad happens later it will be your fault. So, no cost is too high to pay for risk reduction, and no one will challenge any proposal whose goal is to reduce risk.

This incentive system is a structural and cultural sickness in government work. Changing it would be an order of magnitude more difficult than successfully implementing a genuine cultural change at a large organization.

EDIT: Just to be really, really clear: government employees are rewarded for completing work items defined in their procedure documents. They are also the same people responsible for writing those procedure documents.