“unskilled paper pushers and would never hire them to do any real work.”
I’m a mechanical engineer, working on another of many startups. It’s HARD work, with no guarantee of success or a payday. Even the high skilled techies at the EPA have no usable skills in such an environment.
Even in those cases where federal employees have developed some useful technical and managerial skills, the problem is that lots of them worked in an environment where no one was ever held accountable for anything. They just don’t know how to function in a productive environment.