The best solution would be for government IT to simply be competitive with the private sector for talent acquisition. That would probably mean that most senior software engineers will end-up being above the mayor's paygrade however.
No organization should expand outside its desired core competency. Specialization is for organizations. If you want competency you hire it as a consultant. If you need to check that consultant, hire another.
Hire one company to write the spec and the product. Hire two others, small firms, one in the problem space (tax, airlines, etc) to check the business requirements and one in the software space to make sure spec/dev/test processes are adequate.
> Can you imagine the headlines
Yes, 100% lies written by a bitter communist. Modern corporate media in a nutshell. But the government already took the brunt of that for screwing up earlier. The screwup you mention would be no worse. Partly because the news is hyperbolic and nobody believes it these days - every problem reported is the worst ever.
Your projects will never succeed this way, but you’ll have plenty of people to blame for the failures.
Which is why it's already common for government IT projects to use a close variant of this approach, but usually separating out requirement writing to a firm notionally expert at doing that in the problem space instead of having it checked by sich a firm.
