> Compared to building stuff that's never used or scraped shortly after building it, this is probably more productive than most things people work on in the public sector.

That only holds water if this project means that they're never going to work on the never-used or soon-to-be-scrapped project that they'd otherwise be working on if the cypher never needed to be updated.

Ultimately, of course, this project is a tiny rounding error in the government's budget, so it doesn't really matter either way.