You've experienced it. That government website with the clip art aesthetic. The form that only works in Internet Explorer. The DMV system that crashes when you hit the back button. Meanwhile, you can order groceries, file your taxes through a private app, and video chat with your doctor—all from your phone. Why does government tech feel like a time capsule?

The answer isn't lazy bureaucrats or indifferent politicians. It's a fascinating tangle of risk aversion, perverse incentives, and decisions made decades ago that now hold entire agencies hostage. Understanding why government tech lags behind reveals something important about how public institutions actually work—and why well-meaning reforms so often fail.

Here's a fun fact that should terrify you: the Social Security Administration still runs critical systems on COBOL, a programming language from 1959. The IRS processes your tax returns on systems designed during the Kennedy administration. These aren't quirky museum pieces—they're the backbone of programs serving hundreds of millions of people.

The problem isn't that nobody noticed. It's that these systems became victims of their own success. When something processes millions of transactions daily without catastrophic failure, replacing it becomes unthinkably risky. Every Social Security check, every Medicare payment, every tax refund flows through code that was cutting-edge when your grandparents were young. Switching means rebuilding the airplane while it's flying—with passengers aboard.

Then there's the knowledge problem. The programmers who built these systems retired decades ago. Some are dead. The documentation, if it existed, is scattered or lost. Modern developers look at legacy code like archaeologists examining ancient scripts. Nobody fully understands how it all works, which means nobody can confidently predict what breaks when you change it.

Takeaway

Systems that work just well enough become impossible to replace precisely because they're too important to risk breaking.

Government security requirements sound reasonable in isolation. Encrypt everything. Require multiple authentication factors. Conduct extensive background checks on contractors. Lock down networks. The cumulative effect, however, is paralysis—and paradoxically, worse security.

When security rules make modern tools impossible to use, workers find workarounds. They email sensitive files to personal accounts so they can work from home. They write passwords on sticky notes because the 47th mandatory password change this year broke their memory. They skip updates because the approval process takes eighteen months. The very rules designed to prevent breaches create the human behaviors that cause them.

Meanwhile, the approval process for new software can take years. By the time a modern, secure platform gets authorized, it's already outdated. Agencies end up stuck with older, less secure systems because newer ones can't clear bureaucratic hurdles. The cybersecurity team proudly defends an aging fortress while attackers exploit known vulnerabilities that patches could have fixed ages ago.

Takeaway

Perfect security on paper often produces terrible security in practice—people route around obstacles, and the obstacles prevent necessary updates.

Here's where things get economically interesting. Government contracts typically pay contractors to maintain existing systems, not to make themselves unnecessary. A company earning $50 million annually to keep ancient software limping along has zero incentive to build something better that works without them.

The procurement process makes this worse. Writing government tech contracts requires specialized knowledge—knowledge that often exists primarily within the very companies bidding on the work. The contractor who built the original system writes the requirements for the replacement system in ways that mysteriously favor their own capabilities. Shocking, I know.

Even well-intentioned agencies face structural traps. Procurement rules designed to prevent favoritism actually prevent relationships. You can't call a developer you trust and say "build me something good." You must issue formal requests, evaluate bids by predetermined criteria, and often accept the lowest bidder. The result? Companies optimize for winning contracts, not building great software. They become expert at procurement theater while their actual technical capabilities atrophy.

Takeaway

When you pay people to maintain problems rather than solve them, problems tend to persist—and the payment continues.

Government tech dysfunction isn't a mystery or a moral failing. It's the predictable outcome of systems designed to prevent specific past failures now preventing necessary future progress. Risk aversion compounds. Contractors exploit incentives. Legacy systems accumulate like geological layers.

The hopeful news? Some agencies are finding paths forward—small pilot projects, in-house development teams, procurement reforms. Change is possible. It's just slower and harder than anyone wants. Next time you're cursing at a government website, remember: there's probably a dedicated public servant cursing right alongside you, trapped in the same system.