While it's always possible OR AA employees do little (certainly plenty of organizations public and private have such employees), it also seems plausible that it does regional AA things that would otherwise be ... regional FAA jobs.

Bureaucracy isn't that different from code. Some of it's dead legacy that needs to be removed, some of it's legacy that needs to be improved/replaced, some of it's legacy that's good enough, some of it's there for a damn good reason no matter how ugly it looks.

And when it comes to code, you probably trust devs who have specific insights into issues with code and promising replacements.