My brother works in HR at a fairly high level at HUD. He reminds me that most large government agencies have to expect that 1/2 of their employees have below average talent and motivation. So they design many of their processes to function under this assumption.

While HUD is certainly less productive (per capita) than a small team of highly talented people, turns out that in most large organizations half the people are below average talent/motivation. And designing for this instead of pretending that all of your staff is above average allows them to have higher productivity.