FWIW, I represented a company that did a lot of business with the DoD. When I mentioned the $700 hammers of long ago, this is what the VP replied. "When you get a bid for something, the spec's are the size of the Manhattan yellow pages. Then they gather the bids. Then someone else reviews the bids. Then someone else sorts the bids from high to low. Then they ask for samples. The samples go through the same process."
I did business with a government agency. A Request For Quote (RFQ) for a simple fastener could be 15 pages, dealing with everything from actual spec's to small business to minority business data in order to submit a bid.