Disclaimer: I work for the federal government, but my thoughts are my own. From what I have seen, there are a mix of issues that cause this: - It takes a long

Disclaimer: I work for the federal government, but my thoughts are my own. From what I have seen, there are a mix of issues that cause this: - It takes a long time to hire someone (usually 2-3 months), and if they need a clearance, the process is even longer (some clearances can take easily over a year now, and that person cannot do any work until they have them). - A lot of people want to go into these organizations to do cool things, but then find out they have a lot of additional duties they do not wish to do. - Government salaries are capped, and it is very difficult to fire a government civilian. The issue of taking a long time to hire someone means that if someone leaves, their job does not go away. So their duties have to go somewhere, usually on someone else, and that will take a minimum of 3 months if you hire someone off the street. If the job requires a clearance, you now are waiting over a year if the person did not have the right clearance (while the person sits on that spot, so you can't hire anyone else if they come up). From what I have seen, most people hired off of the streets are from college/grad school, and they are excited to do technical work. However, since the government caps civilian salaries, they will frequently contract out technical work (so they can hire the very expensive technical personnel). This means most of the technical work is done by contractors. Civilians more often than not oversee the contractors doing the technical work. If you have a technically inclined government civilian, then those contractors frequently snatch them up. So now you have a compounding problem of it is difficult to hire/keep technical people, and the work they do is more and more non-technical, as most of the work to oversee contractors is what is called an "inherently governmental function", so those have to be done by a government person. This is a negative feedback loop that really hurts keeping these types of technical people.