>> "Have you ever done IT? Some of the biggest problems are political there as well."
Yes. I've even dealt with outside vendors. I've seen those situations work out and occasionally not work out. Almost every time a company outsources development and that 3rd party hands back code that doesn't work, Company A doesn't pay until it works. Company A holds 3rd party developer to it's original bid that a website was supposed to cost $90m not $630m or more. In this case Company A is the US Taxpayer.
>> "If it was entirely in-house like NASA was..." "...less money and would be cheaper to maintain."
I'm not going to disagree so much as I'm going to give you the benefit of doubt that you wrote this without really thinking it through. NASA buys products from thousands of private companies, nothing was built in house by Uncle Sam. Some of those companies have gone out of business because NASA was their only customer. One of the reasons the Space Shuttles became unsustainable was NASA would swap components between shuttles rather than buy replacements, so companies withered and died off. In many situations there was only one working part for the whole fleet because there was no way to buy a replacement.
The Space Shuttle program was also, for all of it's triumphs, a cash hog.