Hiring based on a sustainable budget makes sense. That doesn't tell us if we should hire a few people at a high salary or lots of folks at much lower salaries.

Hiring based on a sustainable budget makes sense. That doesn't tell us if we should hire a few people at a high salary or lots of folks at much lower salaries. I don't have an answer either. It's one of the few economics questions that I've never seen a good answer to. The best I can come up with is to allow some market competition to government services and then to match market salaries. That's still not ideal because labor supply and demand is distorted. I've been asking this question for decades. It's a challenging problem.