Projects only last a few years, so it is hard to hire good devs. Because you can't hire good devs it makes mediocre body shops look appealing. Sounds like a pattern for a death-spiral. Rather than paying wasteful and overpriced contracting shops, such as the ones that employ you, perhaps what is needed is an organization, such as 18F, than can maintain a core of competent devs and build infra and tooling that works across orgs. If the project is short-term then the contracting shop that should be used as a first choice is 18F, and only if they cannot hit the target or specialist development work is needed do they put out a request for an outside party.