All the federal employees I have met are EXCELLENT. It is very difficult to get hired into one of the dwindling jobs at the agencies. A lot of the government has been contracted out. Having worked at a federal IT contractor, I can say that in my experience most of those workers are very good and dedicated to their work. HOWEVER, they don’t always understand well the mission at hand. Some of this is to be expected given that they are contractors who come and go more frequently than federal employees charged with implementing government programs.
Ironically extreme selection pressure is exactly what leads to extreme risk aversion.
"We only hire the absolute best" does not lead to "move fast and break things" (which sounds awful in a FAA context anyway) it leads to people who devoted their lives to being the absolute best at coloring inside the lines and never straying off the path, to being the best follower out there, to the ultimate authoritarians desiring to grow into being the authority.
The heaviest selection pressure usually does not lead to the most efficient system, it generally leads to a system able to endure heavy selection pressure.
There's a sociologist who wrote a famous book about bureaucracy and its in my library at home and the name of the sociologist and his book are at the tip of my tongue but he wasn't near the top of a quick google search; the above is a paraphrase of his book. No its not Douglas Adams or even Scott Adams although those two are correct about the problem in general LOL.
