I didn’t read it like that. What I take from it is that he’s implying that the government uses something much stupider than sql, like Lotus1-2-3 or plain txt files or excel. I really wouldn’t be surprised that there’s some government department that had their IT done during the first Bush administration and didn’t really upgrade from it since.

There are also probably some departments that don’t get much funding, so they organise part of their work into some shared excel files.l

Nothing really wrong with that. Unless he’s implying that the entire federal government works like that, which is preposterously stupid.