That sounds typical for any large legacy codebase serving hundreds of customers. It's not a government thing, it's just the nature of large projects. It's also

That sounds typical for any large legacy codebase serving hundreds of customers. It's not a government thing, it's just the nature of large projects. It's also not as simple as saying that it's waste. Changing 10 lines of code in an app that has been live for years can be the result of months of work and careful ruling out of 10,000 lines of code you decided not to change.