I have had dealings with numerous government agencies over the decades. My overwhelming impression is incompetence or a lack of caring. I have, of course, come across individuals who did a good job. But they are swamped in a morass of people who do a bad job.
Why bother providing good service when just being there is enough? For the most part they would need to kill someone at work to get fired. Even then, I suspect counselling would be tried first.
Here is just one story. I worked for Fairchild Weston EMR. At this point we had 80% of the world-wide crash recorder market. We needed to switch from high failure rate carbon resistors to metal film; a huge improvement with zero risk. We had a consultant who had an office inside the FAA offices. Each Monday morning he would start out to get signatures on an engineering change notice to make the resistor change. Around Thursday people who had signed the document earlier in the week would hunt him up to find out of the document was signed off. If it was not they would withdraw their signature. Nobody wanted to go into a weekend with an open document bearing their signature in case a crash occurred and it was tied back to the change. They wanted the cover of everybody buying into the change first so they could not be blamed if anything went wrong. If this sounds absurd, then you do not understand how civil servants think. It took months to get this simple change approved.
This avoidance of blame by never doing anything is so common at all levels in all agencies that the agencies are close to useless. The jobs are simply a way of redistributing wealth.
In 1966 my part day job taked me to delivery plans and specificstions to Corp of Engineers in DC. At about 3pm I entered the office where six enginerrs were playing poker. Had to wait through three hands before someone finally got up to inspect the package and sign off. Lesson learned early in my life.