Honestly, that's much better than I was expecting. Two years working to improve our shitty government systems in exchange for a quarter of a million? Sounds like a fair short-term deal, even if higher comp is available elsewhere...

Bottom of 116 is pretty huge. Even for the Bay Area thats not a bad start

The actually-doing-tech-work GS levels (GS-10 to GS-13), by comparison, are 50-60k. That is where government pay is still the big impediment.

$116k/yr for your entire mid/late career would also suck (compared to 200-400k in industry), but for <2 years, I can't see that alone being a huge issue, unless you have kids in college, are paying for a mortgage elsewhere, etc.