Back in the day, I actually worked for the gummint, a couple of blocks from the White House. One of the things I did while I was there was to rewrite (in my spare time), a big piece of contractor-written software, which like all contractor-written software did what was specified, not what was actually needed. What I did eventually was adopted by the entire agency and earned me a special recognition award.

I knew some of the contractors who had written the original software, and they recognized that what they were writing was hard to use crap, but like you, their hands were tied by their company and by the specifications they had to write against. I was lucky in that I had no such constraints and I could work to make lives better for the people in my own division.

I wasn't cut out to be a gummint employee though, and moved on to better things.