A lot of these 100,000 contractors...are PhD folks. These are the ones who’ve been on some type of contract with DOE for two or three decades.
Those types of contractors are paid exorbitantly as well, since the money comes from a different agency funding pool. I have experienced that before, where programmers were paid on the order of $150k per year as contractors but as an employee, would have been paid $80-90K. Needless to say, they did NOT want to become employees. Terminate the contract!