When I arrived in DC in 2013, I heard a lot of talk about “building a government fit for the twenty-first century,” as if we were not well into that century already. A big reason for the lag is that our government spent the first several decades of the digital revolution treating tech systems like steel—as a commodity to be bought, not a capability to be developed. Instead, the capability that government has developed well, perhaps too well, is that of procurement.
