How is it different from working with a private company? Lots of stakeholders? More documented testing procedures?
If you are a leader in the bureaucracy, your incentive is to not personally fail, which is not the same as to succeed.
There is an army of auditors waiting to question every decision, so the obvious way to avoid that is to not make any. Balancing the need to do something without deciding anything is an art of sorts.
That creates an incentive never to label anything a failure and just keep pumping good money after bad - that's how to avoid the negative article.