This is a huge issue in my experience. I've done some work as a government contractor and often the govt offices have been so heavily outsourced there's nobody left with any technical knowledge at all to oversee the projects. Like the most technical person literally doesn't know what a git repo is.

Even if you hire good contractors who work in good faith, the inability to have remotely technical discussions leads to all kinds of miscommunication and mismatched expectations.

Building and maintaining more in-house developers would be vastly more efficient for the govt, but so many people have a religious level hatred of public employees and glowing respect for private ones. So we not only end up in the current situation, it's actively being made worse in the US by the current administration.