That was one of the big points in this morning's keynote by Mickey Dickerson. Laws and the federal system is designed to be a big hunk of automation, executed by humans. Failures in the processes are entirely predictable, and like CPUs, the human processors likely can't do much about it.
So, so true.
And also pointed out that the US Federal System is a huge open-source project kicked off a couple hundred years ago with 538 comitters at the moment. There are lessons in big open-source project management in here somewhere, I'm sure.
It turns out one of the biggest goals of the US Digital Service is to ferret out the worst of the bad automation and try to turn it around. Healthcare.gov was their first big project, and right now they're making inroads with the Veterans Administration. They're doing some other things they can't talk about yet because government, but this is all worthy cause kinds of things.
During my last job-hunt I considered applying, but didn't go there due to where I wanted to live and an unclear answer on if they'd take a remote worker. Still, this is good stuff and I wish them all the luck and support.