It's not too bad in my experience. Though in my case, the Federal agency granted the money to a local agency and they were pretty much hand-off since then. I

It's not too bad in my experience. Though in my case, the Federal agency granted the money to a local agency and they were pretty much hand-off since then. I work with the local agency to build the product and they have been great. We set requirements, feature, and schedule together, and they left it to me to manage the entire development process. I convinced them to do a XP-like iterative process to get involved and give feedback. It had work well. If they actually get involved actively with the teams for this competition, I think they will get good result.