Beyond the other reasons stated re: regulations and law, which this government seems to be more than willing to ignore, the process of setting up reliable feeds of usable data between organizational functions can be more difficult than buying the data from an entity whose profit derives from curation and distribution of the same data. It might seem absurd on the surface but paying a premium for a repackaging of the data is often meaningfully easier and more reliable and you probably save money in the end. The TSA tech teams role isn’t to package and enrich data with useful metadata, with documentation and SLAs, and their incentives don’t naturally align no matter how hard a political appointee bangs a table. The data broker has every incentive however, and will continue to in perpetuity.