Sadly public salaries and jobs in general are low hanging fruit targeted by short-sighted political campaigns while all other gov spending tends to be a black hole with zero measurable ROI and countless professional public grant/gov money consumers well aware of the lack of measurable ROI and crony/who-you-know-in-gov nature of spending. Or worse the phony claims of adopting 'private industry' to side step accountability via public-private arrangements which feature none of the benefits of markets (true competition, state anointed monopolies, market dominance disconnected from value provided to consumers, etc).
Most of which could be blanketly solved by hiring good people (the people who dispense and use the money) and not creating quid-pro-quo incentive systems by underpaying public servants.
1. Pay for all the below by strategically cutting military spending some low-to-mid single-digit percentage.[0]
2. Eliminate public sector unions and most Civil Service classifications, both of which make it harder to fire low performers.
3. Peg government payroll for all positions to (if it exists) their private-sector counterpart, plus a healthy percentage, say 15%.[1]
4. Eliminate government pensions and match government employee 401(k) contributions up to a large percentage, e.g. 10% of salary.
5. Allow all government employees to enroll in Medicare.
[0] The military is already getting projects it doesn't want as pork, most of these cuts could be to those programs.
[1] There are legal caps to salary for the executive branch but there are already ways around those (e.g. as contractors).
I do agree that government jobs should be more competitive in the job market, just with caution.