Is there an opportunity for reusable OSS rule systems? It seems that every government at every level could use an expressive system for defining and versioning them.

I suspect part of the gap here is, as you note, everything technical is outsourced and so there is not enough institutional capacity to envision and execute what would be a quite revolutionary re-architecture.

I find it extremely frustrating that the government is able to spend tens of millions on contractors for an IT project, but can’t pay market rate for in-house engineers, even if those would be cheaper in the long run.