My family and I went to the VA hospital for Christmas services, during which the kindly chaplain said goodbye to the veterans to whom he had been ministering. Like a record number of federal government employees, he has decided to retire this year. Because the federal workforce is older than the general population, a certain number of retirements are to be expected. Yet according to the actuaries at the federal Office of Personal Management, workforce age isn’t enough to account for the surge in federal retirements. It’s not hard to see what other factors are driving federal government employees to...