[Iftheshoefits]

This is just the way government contracting works. The "Prime Contractor" is often explicitly required to subcontract out a "meaningful" portion of the work to sub-contractors for a variety of reasons. Mostly because, as touched on in the article, the DoD/lobbyist revolving door has legislated a huge system of what is effectively corporate welfare in the form of contracting. The government throws money and a few "senior engineers" and management staff to oversee the Prime, and the Prime does the a similar thing to oversee the subs, plus some higher-level integration work (which may or may not require a significant staff), and the subs frequently either buy pre-made "Commercial Off The Shelf" (COTS) and sell it at a markup (a big markup) or are selling their own "COTS" product to the Prime (that they develop with in-house/contracted staff), also at a substantial markup.

The public reason for this crap is that the system is supposed to be structured to make sure that accountability exists, favoritism is minimized, and employment is boosted (by spreading out the work). The reality is that the system is designed to maximize the enrichment of the lobbyist-connected owners of the contractors.

[nraynaud]

I think there are a lot of secondary objectives in those rules. Being secondary, they are not pushing for a working website. Stuff like town and country planning (putting a building in an area that need jobs), economic (the made in USA, small business), social (hire old people, disabled, women in tech etc.), competitive process to keep the prices in check (haha), bulk buy to get some discount etc.

Obviously when you have so many targets, you don't hit a lot. Maybe the obamacare website was perfect in some secondary objectives.

But it also arises from perfectly true premise, that big spending is a force on the society and that it as secondary effects, and that maybe we can twist those effects in a political manner. The whole Silicon Valley is living on federal actions.