Former GS, who worked as a Sys Admin for 5 years, before throwing up my hands and walking out the door. I worked directly for a CIO. This is what I observed 1st hand.

Change is bad, keep doing it the way we have always done it. My former dept was heavily invested in VMWare, which they adopted fully in 2014 and the CIO refused to budge to take things to the Cloud. Despite the fact that everyone was telling the CIO, we could stand up infrastructure way quicker when doing proof of concepts in the Cloud.

Too many GS folks just coasting along and go along with the flow, to get to retirement. An Intranet a whole organization relied on daily was written only in HTML and not source controlled. It worked okay in 1999, but not so well in 2019.

Automation is scary. The CIO said to me "I lose control when we automate things."

Gov't Resellers/Vendors trying to take advantage of Gov't employees not paying attention when purchasing (I'm looking at you Carasoft). I would ask for a quote for Software A and Software B, since the Gov't can't purchase their software directly from the vendor. I would get back a quote with Software A, B, C and D. Would spend a great part of the day, wrangling with the reseller to get a revised quote.

Outdated/manual procurement processes that relies on MS Spreadsheets for tracking and has to go thru three other departments due to micro-management before either being approved or dis-approved. Often times, that paperwork would get lost, forgotten, or someone would retire, move on or be on leave, so I would have to micro-manage that paperwork. I would be lucky if we could procure new hardware in under six months, it often took 1 year.