It's actually quite a hard way to earn a living. GETTING the contracts is next to impossible, as despite having the FAR in place, they generally are wired for

It's actually quite a hard way to earn a living. GETTING the contracts is next to impossible, as despite having the FAR in place, they generally are wired for a particular company. Most government work is, of course, only eligible to companies who have 'past qualifications' of doing similar work for government agencies, meaning that new companies have an even harder time breaking into the network of opportunities and that even if you've built a 100 'websites & cms systems' for government agencies, you're not qualified to build a system categorized as 'web portal' unless some of the work you've previously done was labelled as such in the contracts. After you've gotten the contract, it's difficult to work with the government's red tape and still live up to the terms of the contract. If you've ever worked on a project with a prolonged or contracted management life-cycle, you have _some_ idea of what it's like, in a very small sense. Changes requested are shot down by government lifers on little basis. "I vote no, until we've thoroughly thought about the security implications," was a valid rejection on a project I was running that involved, at least partly, replacing plain-text passwords stored in configuration files with Kerberos Keytab certificates. Infuriating, at best. Meanwhile, slips to the project schedule don't affect your project's contractually obligated deadline. The government is generally happy to trod along at a tortoise pace while contractors run sprints in spurts -- weeks waiting on an approval for a change, then sprinting until it's done. Add to that the required overhead of having somebody able to meet incessantly about every single line item in every single invoice. Add to that the fact that in most government agencies, their IT staff is comprised by a heterogenous mix of slow government employees and other contractors that would love to see you fail (as they likely also bid on the work you won, and would love the opportunity to see it rebid in the event that you fail). Add to that having to get approval on every single change in any product, no matter how trivial, by a committee of stakeholders -- the size of which shrinks and grows as the project moves on, and knowing that no change, however firmly approved, is ever REALLY approved until ship date (aside, months after development on a renovation had begun on a portal's backend infrastructure, senior government personnel were still arguing over the look and feel of a mockup that had been approved and finalized prior to the beginning of development.) Again, red tape, red tape, red tape.