Almost every gummint contracting process is rife with fraud, or at best questionable ethics.
For example, consider the grant-making process in Ivory Tower academia. Grant proposals are typically ranked by a panel of peers, allegedly impartial. In the real world, your proposal is reviewed by your friends, and you are on a committee that reviews their grant proposals. You rank their proposal high and they rank your proposal high. Any newcomers who don't have powerful friends on the grant-review committees will never get ranked high, regardless of the merit of their proposals. So you wind up with the grant money always being divided by the same encrusted group of glad-handers among themselves, excluding outsiders. Nobody in the circle will ever propose doing any work that would be controversial in the least - that might embarrass anyone else in the circle.
Beware the poor fool who actually disproves a pet theory of one of the power brokers in the grant-review circles, for he/she will be excluded and never get funding.
Corruption and apparatchiks always dominate when a true market system is not used - whether it is sole source contracting or academic research.
The question is always - WHO DECIDES? - and the market on average will make better decisions than any committee, bureaucrat, or politician.
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