Since the projects were done by consultancies you can't call it a failure from the consultancy point of view. They managed to milk the government for multiples of the estimated budged and this is a great success for them. That's just how it works - underbid, lock in and then massage the client for x10 of the original budget.
If government officials thought that a project of that scale can be done for $1.54 million by a company size of Adobe, then clearly they were negligent in their duty.
It can be done by much smaller group of talented developers in couple years, but I'd imagine it would still cost at least double what Adobe quoted.
Because 1 million is pocket change for a government project. It barely pays a couple of people for the year.
We've seen through things like 18f and usds that the government can adequately and effectively manage software projects itself and produce amazing results. Giving the US government more agency to self-fund ongoing development and procure solutions that are technically superior as opposed to "lowest conforming bid" is what is really needed IMO.
It's stupid that for so long it's been coded into law that you need to spend as little as possible, because that's part of what got us here; the buyers in a lot of cases can't go with a better, more expensive option.
Hopefully the "best value" culture shift in government buying will go along with legal changes to let them act on that.
I have no idea how the process goes, but it seems like some sort of outside consultation on picking appropriate bids might help. Maybe even something like the congressional budget office, but for software systems. That way expertise can be concentrated and they can focus on their core competency, rather than requiring every agency to develop people who can properly analyze bids for software systems.