Sadly, some college students could set up the system using available software. Too many government agencies assume they need new software but don't look at using what is commercially availbe and paying someone to set it up. I bet Oracle or Microsoft could have done the project using an existing product.
Maybe. There are objected oriented APIs for building database interfaces.
What the government needs to do is develop an extension of one of those API sets for government use. That shouldn't take more than $7-10 million dollars and 10-18 months to develop, and simultaneously develop several government applications, including the FBI application. And any new development after that would cost significantly less, and time to deployment would be minimized.
Open source CMS solutions are great examples of how the modular approach and common, object oriented API can allow the creation of unique websites from a common code base.