Wasn't Pulse Secure VPN the one that required an ActiveX control and IE in order to "secure" your system on Windows? I mean, when I see that kind of shit, I kind of assume the vendor sells some shit software.
Just yesterday I was on a federal government web site (FWS, BLM, or some similar agency), and it popped up a window saying that the web site doesn't work in Safari, and I should use IE10.
There are major federal government websites that have office hours. The EIN application website only works between 9am and 5pm. I like to imagine that it's this way because there's no webapp, there's just a team of people who get all the HTTP requests and manually respond to them. This would also explain its speed.
If they're only paying support staff 9 to 5, it might make sense to shut it down outside of supported hours, even if it would probably still work, especially if they're not positive that it won't do something odd like start issuing duplicates if the back-end DB is down.