I watched my father work for the Department of the Navy for two decades. I often visited my father’s office, met a lot of very neat people, including a lot of very fine naval officers.
I’ve been a government contractor on and off since the mid-1980s, and had continuous contracts with the federal government from 1991 through 2006.
Many of my current friends, neighbors, acquaintances, folks with whom I go to church are government employees or contractors.
Here’s a few things I’ve learned in 40+ years in the belly of the beast:
1. There are many fine, hard-working, dedicated government employees.
2. There are as many lazy, incompetent, dishonest government employees than good ones.
3. Good government managers with small spans of control often have very good, even excellent teams that actually get the work done in the government that is given to be done.
4. The larger the the group in the org chart, the more likely it will approach the 50% level of incompetence, ineptitude and laziness.
5. It isn’t that contractors are better people, they’re not. But on many contracts, the companies holding the contracts are only paid for the hours actually worked. In a standard year, for the contracting company to make a profit on a positiion, the worker must perform something above 1800 hours of actual direct work on the contract.
Conversely, federal employees with a few years of service begin to accrue significant amounts of annual leave and sick leave, often spend work time going to various educational events (contractors aren’t generally paid for this sort of thing, and usually do the educational thing off-hours, although there are exceptions), diversity seminars, ethics seminars, etc., and perform work directly related to their jobs about 1200 - 1400 hours per year.
Salaries between contract personnel and federal personnel doing the same job are often similar, but benefits are often much better on the federal side of things.
As well, getting rid of contract personnel is a picnic compared to getting rid of a federal employee, and thus, there is less of a tendency for contracts to accumulate useless workers.
6. Many individuals working on government contracts aspire to being hired on as direct government employees, if possible. There’s a reason for that and it isn’t patriotism.
7. Much of the work done by many federal agencies is unnecessary, useless, or even counterproductive. But there are always some dedicated federal workers within the larger group who perform that work well and efficiently.