In the UK there are restrictions to do with company financial state and length of operation that prevent smaller players from being considered for government contracts.

When the contracts come in they tend to be lucrative but the process of applying for and winning the contract is lengthy and expensive. It favours the larger monolith vendors.

I know of people in the civil service who are frustrated that their department has a technical specialism that is rare in the private sector but they find a significant portion of their work being outsourced and done to a lower standard than they could do with their own resources. To add insult to injury the stuff that is outsourced is the simple and cheap stuff, not the onerous stuff which still has to be done in order for the simple stuff to be outsourced in the first place. The outsourcer requires substantial supervision as the work has to be of a certain standard.

As the cheap stuff is 40% of the work volume the financial budget and staff are cut by 40%. However the cheap stuff represents 5% of the costs, not 40%.

The upshot is that the remaining staff are having to do more work than before both to support the outsource resource and also to cover the cut in their colleagues.

They then face criticisms for an increased backlog. "40% of the work has been outsourced, how can you still have a backlog"?

Discussions with large monolith vendors takes place at a level of the organisation far removed from the coal face where the day-to-day challenges are at best understood in abstract and at a summary level.

The problem is as muhammad ali said, it's not the size of the mountain that defeats you, it's the stone in your shoe