[acdha]

There are two things which need to change: the first is that the government needs to hire more technical staff – years of alleged cost-savings mean that most agencies cannot hire skilled staff and so they lack skilled internal advisors to help review contracts. You can do things like hire contractors to oversee the other contractors — and hope that they're going to actually speak rather wait for quid pro quo next time their companies’ respective situations are reversed. Fixing this requires a change in Congress because the trend since the 90s has been to “save” by hiring contractors instead of staff; since contractors generally cost more per hour, this is rarely a win except for very short-term contracts.

There's a cruel irony in the procurement process where most of the efforts aimed at reducing cost and risk actually increase both by limiting the number of choices and increasing the pain of switching: when everyone knows it'll take months or years to start over with a new vendor only the most egregious failures will be declared unacceptable. I'd tackle this by giving government managers both more discretion and responsibility: more freedom on how their budgets are spent but audit a percentage of expenses every year to review results and conflicts of interest.

The key part of this would be figuring out a good mechanism to reward savings so someone has an incentive to make long-term good decisions. In some cases that might be things like hiring a solid in-house development team to work on a core function of the agency; in others that might be realizing that a service satisfies the most important needs rather than paying to build a completely custom solution.