As mentioned in the piece - the designers at 18F were explicitly following the UKs lead here and were attempting to do just that before being DOGE’d in favor of some political hacks with no understanding or appreciation of the task at hand.
Aside from all the actual success stories with products they rolled out, they'd built comprehensive guides for software procurement that were making every part of the government more efficient -- and then the ~arsonists~ experts at DOGE came through and deleted all of that work because some 'move fast and break things' toadies decided they didn't want to spend so much time on planning and they'd rather just build baby build.
