The irony is that they don't really do that. It's common in both procurement and hiring in the federal government to see bizarrely-specific requirements whose fairly transparent intention is to limit the potential bidder or applicant pool to a single company or individual.
> Procurement rules are more to guard against corruption and cronyism than incompetence.
Former federal IT contractor here.
The procurement rules were designed for that, yes. But in real world scenarios, those rules effectively do exactly the opposite. Since there are so many hoops for potential vendors to jump through, only the most established players get to bid on most contracts. And in my experience corruption and cronyism is still alive and well in federal IT contracting.
Yes. I should have added that I understand the need for basic checks and auditing (and that the public expects us to be uniformly fraudulent as well as incompetent), but that the level of checks and removal from the process of experts who know requirements goes far beyond this need.
It's really all about optics rather than reasonable checks - no department wants to be the one that Congress targets, so especially in poisonous political environments the "checks" are significantly more expensive IMO than the actual "waste, fraud, and abuse" they guard against.
"Without them, you could reward your friends with fat government contracts, regardless of what's in the public's interest.
"
Except this happens anyway.
Much like patents, people just become better at drafting.
What is currently done is not an effective mechanism for stopping cronyism and corruption at all. In fact makes it easier in a lot of cases, because it provides plausible deniability (It's not that we gave it to our friend, it's that you didn't meet the requirements!)
And like most things with government, you end up getting both: the bureaucracy to prevent cronyism as well as the cronyism. Speaking from experience. Sure it might be more obvious if the bureaucracy wasn't in place, but it's still there.
Without them, you could reward your friends with fat government contracts, regardless of what's in the public's interest.