You have offered a distressing view of federal contract officials as often afraid to do their jobs honestly. Some federal agencies — Transportation, NASA, and the DoD, especially — seem to be at the particular mercy of contractor politics. Many NASA and DoD programs seem to be conceived mostly as hi-tech make work. For example, we built the Shuttle as a way to build the Space Station, which in turn provided the Shuttle with something to do.
If you look at the egregious fraud in Medicare and Medicaid that has been tolerated for decades, with very little done about it, you get a glimpse into the widespread reluctance to investigate and prosecute obvious wrongdoing. Sad that so few are held accountable.