You're right and everyone -- including government contractors -- has been quietly shouting this for ages, but existing efforts have already been ideologically co-opted and new efforts are too brash and can't wrap their head around spending more to save more.

Also 18F was not truly shut down and still lives on at GSA, albeit only the worst parts. They're hard at work adding as much red tape as they can imagine to procurement of software and recently boasted about their collective organization answering a whopping 1200 emails in a month.