> I don’t expect much to come except contractor 1’s would-be competitors closing the gap

That means increased competition and reduced costs for the government.

> or using this to throw stones based on existing contract code quality

That means code review, which results in improved code quality one way or another.

I fail to see the problem here.

That’s cool. These are my expectations. Company 1 wins contract and builds something, key team members are experienced with making and navigating the “process”. Company 2 copy/pastes. They have not performed any work yet but they entered a bid X years later and bring up the years of “mediocre” dev Company 1 has done. There is only existing company 1 work and only hope of company 2. Contracting Officer chooses company 2 because promises sound good!

Reality, company 2 wins on cost and doesn’t understand the context of what was built or the environment it was built in. They don’t understand the costs as they didn’t pay them. Company 2 quickly proposes “full rewrite!” Lower cost labor they brought in can’t perform and quality degrades till we have (insert Gov software program here).

Or it doesn’t happen.

Ideally, a body such as NIST would become the stewards of federal libraries that contractors are then compelled to use and improve. If the end goal is about cost efficiency more than any other ideal or objective, then that type of centralisation and reuse should be promoted and enforced.

I'm not familiar with US government procurement, but the way public tenders for software work in the EU, this isn't that likely to happen. You need some serious references to even qualify for most tenders, especially the kinds that this would be a problem for. Without serious corruption, you're not getting it. And with serious corruption, having seen the code won't make a difference.

Organizations often make a few missteps before figuring out what works. Some amount of failure is to be expected when doing anything on the scale of a nation. At least if everything's open, each attempt has the opportunity to learn from the last and can be evaluated on it's merits in comparison. It's also likely that other organizations will find some of the software useful.