Even if it's better than Argentina's, it's still not good: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/grasping-at-paper-straws

Contracting policy/regulation is an area that accumulates the worst tendencies of government rulemaking:

1. Corruption results in hyper-specific rules being advanced.

2. It's very difficult to un-do regulation without replacing it, so rules often stay in place broadly even when whoever wanted them isn't competing in a sector.

3. Executive political initiatives that have public attention but aren't considered worth the squeeze of turning into policy often turn into "do something, anything" OMB memos that add endless specificity to contracting regs, just like the paper straws thing (but hey, they did something, anything in service to the cause of environmentalism, right? ...right?).

4. For specialist contractors (e.g. software, nuclear power, so on) the people writing the contracting regulations or reqs are often so out of touch with the specialist field that the results are nonsense.

5. Even when rulemakers/COs are trying to do the right thing, they're so overworked and under-specialized that they have a huge incentive to pick the devil they know (contractors with prior engagement history, even if their results are poor). As a result, sometimes a bid that clearly requires qualifications only possessed by one company in existence wasn't even written for corrupt reasons: it was written because that's the quickest way to get a known quantity to work. Repeat that enough, though, and you have a system guaranteed to produce poor results.

6. Both parties tend to add to the regulatory "stack" that makes finding qualified contractors quickly hard. Democrats tend to add regulation, which slows the process down for everyone. Republicans tend to try to remove regulation, but effectively often move the complexity elsewhere.

7. Even when regulatory reform really does reduce the barriers to entry, pre-existing federal decisionmakers are still around. Some of those people will make the same well-intentioned bad decisions out of overwork/missing expertise that they did before. A lot more will make bad decisions based on where they want to work after government. The number of people that will take advantage of deregulation/reform and produce notably better results than before is small.

8. The timelines (of contracting and evaluating results) are long enough that there'll likely be a reversal of the regulatory/partisan cycle before anyone can get data saying that a given regulatory effort helped or harmed government effectiveness. For example, DOGE's cost cutting program was a disaster from the start, but even if it had been executed well it would have failed in the same way and on the same timeframe, because the pace of change is necessarily slow.

9. Even when data about what works/what doesn't is available, contracting regulation and performance is incredibly uninteresting to the general public. So electeds and high-ranking feds tend not to prioritize it over the other million things they could fight for. Sure, the public loves when the government spends less money, but they glaze over when it comes to the "how" (and the elephants in the room cost so much that incremental efficiency improvements have bad optics).

10. Different agencies have different contracting practices, usually multiple generations/iterations of those. Government-wide, many people have introduced reforms/uniform or streamlined "universal processes" to secure better contractors faster. That did help somewhat, but it also harmed a la https://xkcd.com/927/