Congressional members (House and Senate) earn $174k/year, which is rather less than leadership of comparable scope is paid in private industry.

Of course, having powerful people who control trillions of spending be not be very well paid themselves above the table has...myriad exciting ways to go wrong.

As a taxpayer I'd rather government leadership paid extremely well and heavily fund GSA audits to ensure strong oversight (and jail time) for those that abuse the position. Fun fact: GSA saves taxpayers $10 for every $1 spent.

Are member of congress leaders? Which people do they lead? They have teams of assistants but they're not huge teams. They seem more like individual contributors.

You forgot to factor in all the benefits and "perks", not the least of which is insider trading.

Insider trading is probably the least perk, if one wanted to abuse their government authority and access. There are myriad ways to go much bigger with corruption.

Insider trading is a perfectly legal perk to them. Corruption isn't.

I'd bet the insider trading pales greatly in comparison to hiring ex-congresspeople for their access and contact sheet

NASA federal salaries are on the higher end of the GS scale because we tend to recruit better talent, and some of our key locations are in cost high areas, near Washington DC, or Silicon Valley. Likewise with our contractors & consultants.

However, we've been losing lots of talent recently to fortune 500 companies that poach our federal talent, and our contractor talent.

200% increases in compensation are not unusual for those leaving NASA federal, or contracting gigs.

Yeah federal pay is rough and probably the primary reason I avoid government jobs, at least for the time being.

I don’t do anything remotely exciting, difficult or demanding for a company you’ve never heard of, yet I make as much as one of the higher paid NASA positions I’ve seen requiring extremely niche experience you will only get from and full of places. Probably more when you consider CoL and such.

Similarly, I saw a position with everyone’s favorite three letter agency. The job looked really cool, and required some modestly niche skillsets and experience in security, reverse engineering, exploit development. Only issue: the starting salary was very rough, particularly for the DC area.

The other thing is just the bureaucratic nature of the pay scales. I’ve seen jobs asking for a PhD or significantly more in YoE that probably requires because that’s what the GS requirements were. I’m not even sure if the usual “don’t interpret job requirements literally” is of any value. After all we’re talking about government agencies. I’d also hope agencies have become to relax degree requirements on certain types of positions but I doubt it. I was told for years, the federal government probably wouldn’t hire me without one.

All that being said, I’d probably be willing to hop on over if the work was really interesting and the pay wasn’t complete atrocious.

My project lead when I was a NASA contractor took a remote offer somewhere in the ~$350k range, which I think must've been at least a 200% raise, if not more. I don't believe he would have left if the agency were able to at least meet him halfway, but that's obviously not possible right now. NASA would save money in the long run by paying market rate imo, it's such a loss of talent and experience when any random startup with a solid funding round can poach the cream of the crop for a few hundred grand.

> Gov spending on salary and perks is really hard for congress to swallow (except for their own salaries).

It's just the opposite. With a few rare exceptions, a federal employee cannot make more than a congressional salary. And since they make just over 174k year, that's the highest a GS-15 can make (after the mandated raises). Hence, GS-15s start at 172.6k.