Well, they are better in some ways and worse in others. Public cloud providers let you offload a lot of lower level operational work off to them and provide you

Well, they are better in some ways and worse in others. Public cloud providers let you offload a lot of lower level operational work off to them and provide you with higher level, and perhaps most importantly integrated, abstractions around things like security. They also provide a straightforward maintenance cost baked into their price that goes down or stays flat with volume. But you're also heavily dependent on the roadmap of that provider, and they do get their margin. If it turns out you can staff, develop, operate, and maintain everything you need in-house sustainably then go do that. I would also argue against open source being objectively superior unless your metric is "how accessible is the source code of the software". There are plenty of cases where closed or open source is the superior solution for a given need. As for my opinion, I think the government needs to work with commodity providers like aws, azure, gcp, etc to get commodity infrastructure services that are certified and usable by any government agency and invest in strong ownership of the development of government-specific software.