Who else to start the trend than the government that was created for the public good in the first place.

You have too look at it at scale too, and most places should either be adopting some platform that already does or be planning on scaling some special service they do.

Every Podunk municple probally should have to have a AD expert, a security expert, a hardware/software lifecycle management person, etc etc

That's how o365 can be cheaper total cost of ownership then an army of siloed sys admins, even if the software is at no cost to them.

Its an investment in total operations of the organizations of the state, from the current state of 1990s tech most operate off of to a modern IT infrastructure.