> I'm a white male and not a combat veteran, so I assume that's the problem and no amount of skill will make the government interested. That's not helping any,

> I'm a white male and not a combat veteran, so I assume that's the problem and no amount of skill will make the government interested. That's not helping any, probably. But you may just need someone to coach you through the application process. It's super-weird and you've gotta write everything so that there's no reading between the lines or figuring anything out—if a requirement reads "did X with Y for Z duration" you have to explicitly say that you "did X with Y for Z duration" somewhere in your résumé. That kind of thing. It's a pain in the ass but if you're not doing that and 100% sure you check all the requirement boxes with the document you're sending, you may as well not bother applying. [EDIT] to be clear, that's the case for pretty much any job with the US government, plus state governments usually. Like most weird stuff about doing business with the government it's probably the result of policies aimed at reducing bias and corruption.