[acdha]

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.