There are a few things there.
One is that, in particular, whenever firms are contracted in to develop digital systems or any kind of citizen-facing digital interface, there is always opportunity for lots of data to be collected that, in some cases, would have privacy questions but also have a lot of value to potentially improve the policy process, make government work more smartly, etc.
There have been cases—and I don't know how much this happens across the federal government but it can happen—that in these contracts you don't specify that the data that's produced is then owned by government. There have been instances of governments buying this back. That's one issue.
On the second point you raised around basically being able to repurpose a service that you procure, we would all assume that's happening. If you were running your own business and you paid for some piece of advice or some service that you could use in different lines of your business, you would do that.
It doesn't happen often in government for a few reasons. One is that the contract might specify that it can't, but more often I think it's because departments aren't talking to each other. It's quite likely, and I have heard anecdotally, that if we had more data on what these contracts were, I think we'd see that in many cases departments and units within the same department are paying for the same thing over and over from the same firms.