If you take Paul Ford’s article on xml in the government

In April, 2002, the General Accounting Office (GAO), published Challenges to Effective Adoption of the Extensible Markup Language. This document recommended that the US government as a whole “develop a strategy for government wide adoption of XML” to ensure that the technology is used across agencies.
In addition, the Government Paperwork Elimination Act of 1998 requires federal agencies to use electronic documents and accept electronic signatures as of October, 2003, another potential use of XML. Taken together, all of this means that not only is there a certain historical pressure to use XML that comes from the historical use of markup in organizations like the IRS and the DoD, but there’s also a legal requirement for agencies to pay attention to XML and deploy it to manage their documents and data.

and this news item

Massachusetts, the lone holdout state still suing Microsoft Corp. for antitrust violations, will become the first state to adopt a broad-based strategy of moving its computer systems toward open standards, including Linux.

together, it makes for some interesting possibilities. It gets even better with semantic technologies for eGovernment

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