Totally! And the funny thing is that it's something of a cultural food chain. The next-biggest entities that likely suffer from this are the sorts of companies

Totally! And the funny thing is that it's something of a cultural food chain. The next-biggest entities that likely suffer from this are the sorts of companies (the Boeings, HPs, Lockheads, Oracles...) that are selling these agencies the goods (because they buy lots of their software this way as well). I'd be thrilled to see it trickle down and change the way a lot of these projects are bought-and-paid-for. That said? It's nerve-wracking. My (barely educated) impression is that lot of these projects are something like selling a multi-million dollar project that hasn't been built yet to the organizational equivalent of the cat-lady from the Simpsons. Attaching what are essentially performance-weighted payment structures to it (we'll pay you when/if we use it) sounds risky. Even if you think you're capable of building a solid product, you're success at this point also depends largely on the client's ability to predict and specify their actual needs. I'm in the weeds, but my point is that I wonder if the CIA might find bidders for these projects turn shy.