I’m not doubting your veracity - I do believe you have honestly recounted what you were told.
I do, however, doubt the veracity of the story itself. USDA is not charged with inspecting missile components.
RB is saying she was transferred TO become an inspector over there. Probably some civilian oversight position.
That is true, but as I learned from applying for jobs in the government, an inspector is an inspector, to a bureaucrat. An inspector takes a set of specific criteria and matches them to the products they inspect, be they eggs or nuclear warheads. As they were already government employees, they got first crack an any job openings as inspectors anywhere within the government.
This isn’t the only situation where I have seen this. At a company I used to work for, we had a new DCAS in-house inspector replace a retiree we had had for a long time. FWIW, she was female and a minority. We manufactured missile launching systems for the Navy ships and others as well for Air Force aircraft, full of electronics and the like. She didn’t know a resistor from an integrated circuit, but she was the DCAS inspector and she had been transferred from some other location where she had inspected food products. We had lots of problems with her and complained to DCAS superiors, but they couldn’t do any more than sympathize, and tell us she had to have that slot.
A little while later, after I had gotten another job with a different company, I spotted her in a local restaurant having dinner with OUR (D) CONGRESSMAN from our district. Then I knew why........................