Indeed. I work with governments all over the United States from federal, to states to counties, and even to larger cities. This is a consistent pattern I see as well. We have senior IT people who don't even know basics about firewall configuration. In one place, I waited 2 weeks for the IT person to figure out how to even get into the firewall configuration. Then they proceeded to completely screw it up in obvious ways, and then once we got the firewall completely configured, we could not get the app to work. It took another 2 weeks, and burned 40 hours of engineer time on our side, before somebody on their end realized that they had modified the wrong firewall!

I wish I could say that was an unusual experience. In another jurisdiction it took two months and we finally got to the point where even providing specific coaching telling them that it wasn't working because they opened the TCP port numbers we said instead of UDP, even though UDP was heavily emphasized. The stonewalling and constant battling ended up delaying our launch to the point where the decision makers decided to just can it instead of fight with their own IT organization.

Now that said, I have worked with some truly incredible and brilliant people on the government side. There definitely are some fantastic people that work for the government. Unfortunately they seem to be in a minority.