KInd of like Ada perhaps
Frankly, I doubt these people know what they are doing. It's probably possible to move the federal government -- at least everything that doesn't face the public, to IPV6. But this doesn't sound like the way to do it. We'll ignore the lurking question of why on Earth one would want to spend considerable money and resource to "fix" something that very likely isn't broken.
A few of you may recall the Ada fiasco of the mid 1970s. Back in the distant past, the US Department of Defense looked upon its ever growing IT budgets and said to itself. What we see is chaos. And it is growing. We must do something. We can't easily do anything about the hardware. We're stuck with what we own. But we CAN do something about the software. And we will. We shall convene a coven of wizards and have them conjure up a single computer language that will satisfy all our needs. Because we are such a large customer, we can coerce the craftsmen and their masters into using it for all purposes. And the economies of scale shall be enormous. And the OMB will be ever so pleased.
So the wizards convened and conjured up Ada. Let me say that there is nothing especially wrong with Ada per se. People can and do use it today. And it works OK. It bills itself as being ideal for mission critical, safety critical, yada, yada, yada ... applications. And maybe it is. If suspect a lot of that is BS of various degrees of purity, but maybe I'm wrong. And it's certainly not unsuited to such applications.
Having an Ada specification in hand, the DOD then told it's program offices (the folks who do procurement and manage development efforts). From this date forward, thou shalt use Ada or risk disgrace and being passed over for promotion. And the program offices told the contractors. Thou shalt use Ada. And the contractors looked around and said, "OK, where can we get an Ada compiler?" And they found that there were no Ada compilers. And it also turned out that writing an Ada compiler was a non-trivial job. So the contractors said to the program offices. "Look, we can do what you need when you need it, but not in Ada. How about writing us a waiver and we'll use Fortran (or whatever) and rewrite it later in Ada if you so desire?" So waivers were requested And granted. Lots of waivers.
Ada compilers were eventually written. But by that time, the enthusiasm for Ada had passed.
There was incidentally another problem with Ada -- which was that it somehow got advertised as a language for "embedded systems". What's an embedded system? The dimwitted, cheap little chips that run your coffee maker and the hygrometer in my bathroom and things like that are embedded systems. The military owns a LOT of those. And in the 1970s the digital hardware for them was extremely simple. Typically a few TTL chips, a bit of memory, and some custom circuits. You didn't program those in a higher order language -- especially not one with garbage collection which makes timing analysis next to impossible. You programmed them in assembler.
Anyway, Ada was a near total flop from the DOD's point of view.
I think this edict is likely headed down the same path. What would I do if anyone asked me (which they won't)? I'd take one government segment that no one cares much about. The folks building the border wall that no one but Donald Trump wants perhaps. And I'd promise them all the resource they needed and tell them to go 100% IPv6 and document all their problems (existing gear that CAN'T do IPv6 and has no off the shelf replacement for example) then write a conversion manual. Then I'd have two or three other organizations try to follow that conversion manual. Then I'd have them write a guide for the rest of the government. Then, and only then, would I start laying down mandates. And only if I still thought 100% IPv6 was a good idea.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
