They could, they just don't want to pay for it. The government has no interest in being known for easily handling a huge spike of traffic during a crisis. They can just take the lower road and get by with less and saying 'try again later'. There's no repercussions here because it's the government.
Hence mainframe maintainers should really move to charging $1 million/year in a decade or two.
They aren't choosing to have crap infrastructure, their infrastructure is intentionally defunded as part of a political campaign to engender distrust in government functions and increase privatization. Government is incompetent because if it is, its easy to justify selling off the country to the incredibly wealthy so they can get wealthier.
It's a bit worse than that. The infrastructure isn't actually defunded, there are huge funds allocated to projects, but they're being consumed by managers at Deloitte, Lockheed, Booz Allen, Accenture, etc. The times when we see success is when enough funding trickled down to the few engineers who could make it work with what they get. Other times we see success is when there is enough public oversight by sufficiently independent stake holders. I see this in many local government agencies that are small, and projects accountable to city council, and so on.
So, legitimately, how to we make it so the government does have repercussions? I see a lot of people making jokes about guillotines and nooses, but is there no better way?
I suggest by campaigning to bring logic and critical thinking into early childhood education. Then philosophy, the classics. Science education.
Once you have more people who can understand that there are scientific and moral issues with manifest destiny, and religion isn't going to solve global warming, there will be some shifts in the public discourse and public policies.
It's the creation of pseudo-scientific explanations for coincidental advantages Europeans had, that created extreme intellectual complacency and bias that is holding back progress.
