They can’t, they have to pay a competitive wage. Especially when you’re talking about doctors, lawyers, scientists, and national security specialists. The problem is all the unionized bureaucrats - there’s over a million unionized federal workers, and we all know what that means.
Precisely. In fact, federal salaries for jobs that require high-level skills (doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers) are generally much too low to attract talent, because they’re stuck on the same stupid one-size-fits-all scale with the interchangeable paper-pushers.