There are just three primary reasons why public sector digital projects fail, although you can break them out into a myriad of more detailed reasons/examples:<p>1. Competency Gap: Public sector organizations don't have the right people of the right quality as part of the organization with the right skill-set to not only do the project, but even to appropriately evaluate vendors. Entire books could be (and have been) written on this topic, but the competency gap is now so bad in the public sector that they're not even capable of hiring the right people, and therefore it is intractable for them to ever solve this problem.<p>2. Misaligned Organizational Incentives: Public sector acquisition rules disallow the public sector from forcing companies to take losses except under very narrow conditions, this type of cost-plus modeling, even on what would otherwise be a fixed-priced contract, incentivizes external entities to milk the government teat for all its worth rather than delivering on time and under budget.<p>3. Misaligned Personal Incentives: Public sector projects are inherently politic, and are rife with corruption and abuse. Going beyond the obvious, this also exacerbates point 1 above, because anyone involved in a public sector project that's not either naively selfless or an idiot will take a private sector job at a many times multiple of their public sector pay to do the exact same work on behalf of the selected vendor. In fact, the revolving door of public sector / private sector is a form of blatant but "legal" corruption that exists effectively globally without much comment from anyone.<p>If I was being pithy, the short answer is that at least in the US, and most of the West, Boomers broke the government to exploit it for their own personal greed, and by violating the social contract made it a toxic place for anyone who isn't similarly interested in the grift from being involved in.