Government procurement has moved from the centralize & outsource model under the conservatives. Some folks seem to hope that a competition or even gaming model is a good way to get good software produced. I do think that fundamentally both of these are misguided. IT needs to be broken down into smaller, more modular projects that are open source and can be re-used by a broader community. Government can build procurement efforts to do this, but often it boils down to re-thinking about the scope of the project being addressed. Some ideas/examples on open source & procurement are up here https://github.com/mgifford/open-source-contracting