Then why did you write:

> if they can afford to pay Anduril to hire those people, they can more easily afford to hire the same people themselves.

They can't afford to hire the same people because they can't (as in, they legally cannot) pay the salaries those people are going to demand. That's what I was responding to. The gov't cannot afford to hire the same people themselves, they can hire other people at lower salaries but not the same people.

Because that's obvious? Hiring someone is always cheaper than hiring someone else to hire the original person.

You can't transform something into an affordability problem by wishing. Do you think giving the government more money would solve their hiring problem? No? Then their hiring problem isn't related to what they can afford.