> My experience in flyover republican country is that anything that makes a government agency worse, or makes a government worker less happy is good, because it can help bolster the private industry alternative

And that's at best! For many, the cruelty of making their perceived opponent less happy (without any benefit to oneself) is sufficient motivation for them to support policy. Policy as a tool to "hurt people"[1].

1: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173678/tr...

The better solution would be to locate government agencies in red states so they are staffed with representative employees who are at least theoretically sympathetic to their values. Those agencies would cease to be a perennial target for sabotage because no one wants to legislate away X jobs from their state. I would go so far as to allow any federal employee to be allowed to legally work in any State … which feels quite American to me. After all, why should any State or district be elevated above its peers in regards to governance of the whole?

Some of this is already done. For one thing, it's a way to spread funding around. I have a friend who was a higher-up at a Federal agency that had its offices in Ohio. There are state colleges and universities all over the place, and public school teachers are government employees. Hospitals get a lot of public funding. And of course, military facilities.

Possibly part of the envy is the disparity in wage visibility. Nobody knows how much people make in the private sector, whereas government salaries are a matter of public record, and can seem high relative to a sub-living-wage job, while also having "cadillac" benefits, reasonable job security, and comfortable working conditions.

I've read (and probably seen) that there are large regions of the Midwest where the only towns with any appreciable prosperity either have a college or a hospital, or both.