The connection there is that for a whole bunch of reasons, certain firms have an incumbent advantage. Often, because of the processes from the perspective of those bidding for contracts and because there are so many hoops to jump through, it can be difficult for smaller firms to bid. You end up in a case where you set up the big firms to continue to get contracts.
Why does that lead to lower quality outcomes? Is that the idea? Part of it is just the basics of not being able to force competitive pressure against these vendors, because they're going to keep winning these contracts whatever the outcomes, really.
It is remarkable how often, despite project failures or underperformance, these contracts might still be issued to those vendors. Part of that is we don't have a clear way of assessing what project success looks like. We don't have strong and proactively disclosed data on whether or not a project led to a good outcome. That's something that we couldn't determine from our data. We can see how much we spent on contracts. We don't even know what was produced from that.
This is a really common phenomenon. In interviews I've done with U.S. public servants, the same conversation comes up that there's a small cluster of three to five big firms at any given time. Sometimes it switches who's in the lead, but roughly there are three to five different firms. They'll move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction delivering bad projects, and they keep getting hired in part because no one's talking about it and no one's disclosing it in ways that make sense.