That is an awefully big paintbrush you are using. Not every Federal Worker is the personnat the post office that ignores you, a corrupt IRS bureaucrat or a porn watching Homeland employee. These idiots give us all a bad name.
We are DOD men and women making things for the warfighter, managing contracts, ensuring quality and engineers. We are NASA and orbital engineers working on your defense systems. Who do you think oversees the maintenance, design and upgrades of your nuclear program? Military folk rotate in and out every 2-3 years. We live here.
We are planning mankinfs trip to the Stars, watching the weather, drug interdiction and doing all kinds of jobs - hand in hand with Americas best.
Only a few bad apples ruins the work of hundreds of thousands of excellent people.
Having seen, as a contractor, the internal operations of a number of departments and agencies, my observation is that the federal workers who genuinely do work worth the name are encountered with needle-in-haystack frequency.
On the other hand, federal employees who are there to do nothing but milk the system for maximum personal benefit and who cares about the rest of the world are overpriced at a dime a dozen.