[steveBK123]

No this is really how stupidly it works. Government software consulting is insane.

The licensing/certification stuff basically creates monopolies.

My spouse worked at a digital agency a decade ago, that it turned out was basically a near-monopoly provider of certain types of software for the local government.

The thing was, none of the work was actually done by them. It was all subbed out to 3rd party dev shops who couldn't qualify themselves for the required licensing. Further, they subbed out all the dev offshore.

So the government was both overpaying for offshore devs, and thinking they were spending money locally because the intermediary happened to be local.

They could have gotten the same work for 40-50% cheaper just skipping the front company, or spent the same and hired actual local devs they thought they were.