You want to keep those people in the organization where the processing is actually occurring. Tell us anything about doing business with ED that makes your job difficult. A big problem is access to databases. A situation occurred in which dial-in numbers and user ids were changed on one system without our knowledge. It was a long process to get access restored and we had customers waiting for responses.
Contractors attempt to price work based on what is known about the job at the time.
However it can become much more complicated than expected, which changes the pricing, which requires a mod to the contract. This takes a long time. Contractors generally have more systems knowledge than ED staff and even within contractor organizations, the greatest knowledge is at the lower levels. This makes it difficult to specify in any detail the work to be done. However, some contracts have more flexibility for maintenance work than others.