That's a big reason why I left a defense job I otherwise liked. Due to government regulations regarding contractors, every change had to be directly attributed to a request for functionality that the government generated or approved. It could take upwards of 2 months for a single one-line change, which was quite frustrating. There were spots in the code where the engineers KNEW things needed to be fixed but they weren't allowed to because they couldn't get the proper authorization.
An interesting side effect was that the group I was in made a point to use the best software engineering practices they knew (100% test coverage, all tests pass with each checkin, every checkin was code reviewed) because the engineers knew that, once code went out the door, it could be a long damned time before anyone touched it again.
I worked at a University where it would take a week to get production logs. If I couldn't find the source of the bug, I'd have to deploy a new version with a few more debugging statements, and wait another week to see the debugging in the next production logs. I eventually learned to put a hell of a lot of debugging statements in my code. I think about every other line was a debugging output statement.
An interesting side effect was that the group I was in made a point to use the best software engineering practices they knew (100% test coverage, all tests pass with each checkin, every checkin was code reviewed) because the engineers knew that, once code went out the door, it could be a long damned time before anyone touched it again.