According to this site, GS-15 10 is $143,598.00/year (I was curious and I figured others here would be too)
[1] https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
USDS has the whole short-term tour/prestige going for it, though, so they can plausibly get people to take a temporary pay cut as an act of public service.
I think there's some of "this is shiny and new and putting the plane together as it flies" excitement that's different now (from what I saw in 2015 when with 18F), but USDS is better positioned thanks to long-developed trust to get more things done, IMO.
Granted, that's usually in expensive metros, but it's not like DC is cheap either.
Realistically, a lot of people on the left do not like "techies" and feel that devs at Google, FB, et al are horrendously overpaid relative to their contributions to society. So while the Democrats may be okay with the general principle of, "the government should be able to pay more to get the people they need", I think they'd balk at actually paying FAANG-level prices for engineers. Almost 200k for a new grad CS major? That's a hard sell to a party that focuses more -- or at least advertises itself more -- on the poor and working class.
Is it wrong for me to think that those numbers shouldn't be super far apart?
I am a former public servant. I earn after 2 years of experience what they paid people with 6. And I don’t work for a FAANG or even a decently funded VC firm, but am guessing that I am now significantly underpaid (initially signed up for it for interesting work, but that went away so fixing that presently). And I live in Canada, where salaries are already compressed.
That working at a not well paying startup can rapidly outpace the government is a huge problem for digital infrastructure.