Cisco may not have anything to do with it. It may be down to a salesman in the middle who is on commission. I once saw CCTV cameras deployed with Jena lenses, I guess for similar reasons. The auditors (if there were any) weren't knowledgeable enough to know better.
edit: After further reading, Cisco did in fact shamelessly participate in this gigantic boondoggle.
Well there is something to be said for know-little middle management types seeing a name brand on something and then throwing the whole budget at it because they don't know what the hell they are doing. That's not even a shot at Cisco's products, just that tons of people buy Cisco hardware solely on the brand name than actually investigate what their needs are. Microsoft is the same way.
I chuckled. It is, in fact, quite easy to imagine that American bureaucrats (as a collective) are that stupid. I'm not discounting the other possibility, though.
Whats somewhat sad though, is that for the majority of my time, America was described as the place where things "just worked".
To be fair, a lot of things do "Just work". This may just be the time Americans look to their government and decide to clean house and rehire competent people into it.
They can hire all the competent people they want, the system itself has become broken. There's too little representation and too much gerrymandering. There needs to be profound systemic reforms to even begin to address what's wrong with the US government.
Doing antisocial things for money is corruption in the public sector. The same grade of evil in the private sector is fiduciary duty and entirely acceptable, regardless of how high the cost to third parties.
