Contractors are a necessity but they have a terrible track record of hosing the government. Remember when you hire a contractor they will not perform any task not in their contract unless the contract is amended and additional $$$$ flow to them. A government civil servant has to perform “other duties as required” so you can get more out of them.
Defense companies will sell the government whatever they have developed regardless of sustainability or compatibility. It is the job of civil servant government engineers and logisticians to make sure that when possible, the taxpayer is actually getting some bang for their buck and that systems have longevity. It is also the job of government civil servants to maintain and repair many of these systems and they do so at a small fraction of the price and usually far, far faster than contractors perform that work. My defense experience was that sending an asset to a government depot for repair returned that asset to the field in a month or two when a contractor was lucky to get it back to us within six months and often almost a year.
Some of the bad behavior we have seen lately (IRS & Defense info leaks) have been done by contractors not civil servants. What they need to do is start whittling down the legions of Senior Executive Service and excepted service positions. After that then they should take a look at rank and file civil servants. But just cutting them without any real thought as to what they do and who would do it instead (and how much that would cost) is really short sighted.
Who then hire support service contractors to do all the stuff the feds not only won't do, but which shouldn't even be done in an effective organization. Part of this is driven by metrics based perfromance compensation which incentivises inefficiency rather than needed outcomes.