A senior project manager reminded me of the power of Freedom of Information requests to stop things.

Yes, we can do that for the Minister, but the Minister should be aware that his request will be FOI discoverable.

Back in the day, let’s say 1998, a request came though to the IT group.
”Configure ISDN line and Cisco router to the home of senior public service executive.”

Said senior executive thought that using a dialup modem and VPN token, which everyone else was capably using, was far too difficult for her.  So, $20,000 later, the public servant had a connection to the government network, funded by our taxpayer dollars.

This would not happen these days, as some smarty would say

… that request would be FOI discoverable …

The Cisco router was called the Henderson router.