T - Rant - Government Web Sites

Why does it seem like any web site associated with the government was designed by idiots who last payed attention to the Internet back in about 1990? Their sites are horribly designed with absolutely no flow to them and the data input forms are archaic beyond belief. I just tried to put a date into the FAFSA web form and discovered that they want it as 02152010 rather than something a normal human might think up - like say 02/15/2010. I've been getting more and more pissed about these things lately because there is absolutely no excuse for them. It is simply a case of incompetent people being paid by the taxpayers to produce crap. Maybe they ought to think about firing them all and getting some web programmers who have at least basic knowledge of e-commerce and web programming. At least when an on-line merchant has an unusable site you can vote with your dollars. There just doesn't seem to be anything to be done about lousy government sites.