It’s a matter of procurement process and personnel. They simply aren’t always concerned with cost as the primary decision point and thus tend to not negotiate as hard as you might like. I’m in a finance role, company’s money is my responsibility so I very frequently have to tell procurement people that think a product “ticks all the boxes of the RFP” or similar, that the runner up product only missed on items we can live without so paying 2x isn’t worth it. I does come off as lacking critical thinking, but I’ve come to learn they just go off the requirement and don’t really know which things are critical versus nice to have. Those kinds of things, so I’d blame this entirely on whoever is supposed to have financial oversight over the bureaucracy. Do they have CFOs or similar, idk honestly, but that’s a reason most for profit companies do. They are monitoring large financial decisions for reasonableness.