Opex vs capex budgets is the issue then. The finance people have too much power.

For the in-house experience, keeping a core focus is important for any business. “Are we a website company now?” isn’t something I want my government weather department asking. They’re always going to be worse than industry and one website company per gov department isn’t a slope I’d like to slip down.

Also, sometimes actually defining at the boundaries the problem helps to solve it ie when the internal team creates a spec doc for the ext dev team.

IMHO, the reason government projects end up like this is derisking, pearl clutching, being difficult pricks to deal with and then being uncompromising on process change.

All of the worst aspects you could hope to find in the enterprise at the same time, and then they have a monopoly on being the government.