Sometime, long before I ever came along, CIOs in the Federal sector became convinced that the only way for software to work was for it to be big, sold by SAP/Microsoft/Oracle, and have a huge pricetag. Anything else is a huge risk in their world.
They just don't believe that something that takes so little money, man-hours, and time to implement can possibly satisfy their requirements and replace such a huge portfolio of bloated legacy systems.
I built a metadata management system in a few weeks as a "rapid prototype" for a branch of the US military. It satisfied all of their requirements, was fast, secure, and stable. It was storing all of the production data and was made to be production ready by simply flipping a switch. Then the CIO saw it.
"Wow, this is amazing. Can you give the code to Team X so they can build it in Sharepoint?" 8 months later, a stunted, awful version of my prototype was demoed. The thick-client interface was gone, replaced by the awful, non-responsive Sharepoint bullshit. The Postgres back end that cost nothing was replaced with an expensively licensed SQL Server DB. The Google-like "search as you type" capability that was in my "prototype" was gone. Infinite scrolling in the grids was gone. Did I mention that they force their users to use Internet Explorer 8 because of "security reasons"? Never in my life have I witnessed such a huge level of IT incompetences as that on display in the United States military. This is almost surely due to endless bloated budgets which allow wankers like this to continue to keep their jobs.