We don't hear much about it, but the NSA has had some stunning IT failures. Development (heck, they can't open their Utah site because of severe, ruin $100K of hardware each time, power glitches), something major above their collection system(s) failed hard once for more than a few days ... and since they're the No Such Agency, we only hear about some of the very worst ones, I'm sure.
Flip side is, doing this in the black budget does allow them to avoid some of the usual government contracting insanities. While that's no gaurentee of success, e.g. look at the NRO's recent expensive stumbles, from the dozen years I spent Inside the Beltway I've gotten a strong impression the intelligence community does a generally much better job than run of the mill open Federal IT.
Flip side is, doing this in the black budget does allow them to avoid some of the usual government contracting insanities. While that's no gaurentee of success, e.g. look at the NRO's recent expensive stumbles, from the dozen years I spent Inside the Beltway I've gotten a strong impression the intelligence community does a generally much better job than run of the mill open Federal IT.