This appears to me to be a terrible idea. In effect you would have private companies writing the laws of the land. "I'm sorry California you can't change your laws because it doesn't fit into the three options we have available at our preferred software vendor". Seems like the tail wagging the dog.
Login.gov cribbed off of the UK’s digital office that built a similar system. I believe that’s what OP was alluding too.
How many unemployment systems, prisoner tracking systems, DMV systems do you need? These are common components across governments.
Example: Login.gov now supports local and state government partners. Your constituent IAM needs can now be met by a federal team that is efficient and competent, instead of every city and state reinventing the wheel (poorly and in expensively).
> Example: Login.gov now supports local and state government partners. Congrats, your constituent IAM needs can now be met by a federal team that is efficient and competent.
Outside of functions that are joint state-federal to start with, states tend to treat the federal government as just another outside sovereign (and one whose Administration is intermittently actively politically hostile), which is worse than a private contractor in terms of being able to get them to uphold their end of a contract.
So, not someone you’d outsource to unless you were more concerned about having someone else to blame if things go wrong than actually being able to assure that things go right.
> How many unemployment systems, prisoner tracking systems, DMV systems do you need? These are common components across governments.
Mostly, not, because while the names may be the same, the actual laws setting the system requirements tend to be radically different.
It could go that way. But the idea is that Massachusetts might charge EVs extra license fees because they want to replace the lost gas taxes whereas Montana and Mississippi wouldn't. Massachusetts already has different and higher pollution regulations (typically based on California's).
Other states might want to do the same, although the fees would probably differ. So the idea is that 10 or 15 states cluster around one solution for a department, 20 for another, 10 for a third and the rest go their own way. The states would have a lot of power in being able to replace working solution A with B or C. So there's 3 or 4 DMV vendors, there's 3 or 4 unemployment vendors, some for contact tracing (my state of Oregon still hasn't implemented the Google/Apple tracing), and so on.
The current situation is that you know a potential replacement will be late and over budget, you just don't know exactly how bad it will be. And Accenture and IBM like it that way and are very adept at persuading the decision makers that they're very special snowflakes and can't use an off-the-shelf solution.
> The current situation is that you know a potential replacement will be late and over budget, you just don't know exactly how bad it will be.
The solution to which is “stop doing big-bang replacements of nontrivial operational systems, instead of incremental ship-of-theseus replacements, using something like the strangler pattern.” And that applies to initially automating existing manual processes, too.
> You can solve this problem pretty easily by using free software projects.
Yes, but not just using existing ones, but having public agency specialized software be developed in the open in free software projects, which could then be forked, remixed, or used as is with or without upstream contribution, as appropriate, rather than closed silos.
