As for government usage of funds? Its completely fucked. There is so much waste, and zero effort to save. Bureaucracy actually prohibits you from trying to save money, and punishes you if you do. There is enormous overhead, and anyone that the government does business with knows they can rake them over the coals, and charge triple, and get away with it by playing the right cards that line up with the regulations the bureaucracy imposes.
I think anyone you ask thats not a politician making up a bullshit answer who works for the government would agree.
actually we make very little off of government work, and it costs us way more to do it because of all the bureaucracy. I've gone over this argument with examples a half a dozen times in the past though if you look up my posts, no desire to get into it again. it's a pain in the ass and none of it's high margin work compared to everything else we do. the only upside is it's usually available because the government owns more buildings than anyone else and they constantly have improvement programs going to keep them up to par.
by far the most expensive thing we sell is man hours, and it takes us twice as many man hours to do any given government project. not only that, but where we work directly with the private sector, we have multiple OTHER parties involved with the government... adding even more man hours to the project (although the others are charging outside of us, so I don't even know what the true cost is). I can understand this practice in certain parts of gov, but not with what we do.
They run that one size fits all mentality though.