I'm doing consultancy (mainly becz I haven't found a startup that I'm interested in joining) and I'm find the hourly rates (in the US) are really low (below FTE

I'm doing consultancy (mainly becz I haven't found a startup that I'm interested in joining) and I'm find the hourly rates (in the US) are really low (below FTE). Not sure if it's because of all these layoffs or just yearly budgets haven't been done yet. (I'm generally looking for react/nodejs/rest/graphql type 1099 roles).