It's not that it reads like a Russian government contract, it reads a bit like any government contract.
The problem here isn't even necessarily with the government: Had they gone with anyone else at a sane price tag, Deloitte would have sued that company to oblivion and the Government as well, probably for all sorts of IP issues.
I can assure you that the GSA does not treat its construction contractors so preferentially. Lowest public bid wins, with preference to companies owned by service-disabled veterans, women, and minorities. I’ve never been directly contracted by the GSA, but I’ve been a sub for GSA projects several times. The closest you get to “one party fits the contract” are systems like fire alarm, where if a Siemens system is in the building, you must sub out the work to Siemens, or if there’s a Johnson Controls BAS system, you’ll need to sub out that work to JCI.
I know there is a decent amount of corruption in local/state construction contracting so I cannot claim there is 0 fraud for federal construction contracts either.
Construction projects are more understood than software projects, as you have a tangible result that either meets the specs and passes inspection, or doesn’t. It’s a bit different than contracts software or a new plane where the specs can be interpreted in looser ways.
It's good this doesn't occur in all areas, but at least for software systems (the area of vendor contracts I'm familiar with) it's not uncommon. A vendor provides an opaque system that requires relatively deep knowledge of it to perform integrations etc. A third party would need to dig deep into the system & documentation to work with it.
I've seen this with SunGard/Ellucian, and also Oracle. They would not make their documentation & technical manuals publicly available. A third party arose offering general maintenance & other services, and used customer's documentation copies to do so. SunGard sued them, and the customer [0]. Oracle has done something similar [1].
Unfortunately, this is a common practice by providers of large proprietary systems, and whether or not the vendor prevails is almost irrelevant: customers now know that competitive bidding brings a risk of costly litigation.
Personally I don't think suing your customers is a very good business practice for long term customer loyalty. Then again some industries only have the choice of a few vendors, roughly equally litigious, to choose from. The alternative is to create your own custom system, but that's an option only available to very large customers.
The problem here isn't even necessarily with the government: Had they gone with anyone else at a sane price tag, Deloitte would have sued that company to oblivion and the Government as well, probably for all sorts of IP issues.