[craftsman]

> No agency would voluntarily modernize systems

This is speculative based on an idea that you have about what must be true. It can be shown to be untrue by one example: NASA, NOAA, and other agencies now host applications and data in a cloud environment. Before this, they were hosted at various NASA data centers. You can now search for, download, and operate on data in the cloud. In contrast, twenty-five years ago someone was required to order a physical magnetic tape. They could have kept those systems running, but they didn't.

[BluSyn]

Did these digital modernization efforts result in lower agency head count, or did they instead use it as excuse to ask for higher budgets?

[craftsman]

Much better user experience--and in these examples the users could be high school students or teachers, college students, grad students, PIs, public policymakers, etc--users can do complex searching, filtering, previewing data images & plots, and selecting data over a wide variety of spatial and temporal bounds. They can also either directly download the data in a self-describing format (with metadata), or they can describe various kinds of post-processing that is done efficiently and quickly.

[lores]

You're moving the goalposts to leave your internal narrative unchanged. Look, I've worked for huge corps and for the government. There's no particular difference in efficiency between the two; efficiency goes down with scale and legacy rather than with public/privateness. The only non-ideological choices that matter are how much you de/centralise decisions and recording (trading decision efficiency for implementation efficiency) and whether you make those decisions and records at all (moot, someone will anyway, that's valuable data).