There's this interesting Gell-Man amnesia affect when it comes to government employees: everybody assumes that the government as a whole is superbly competent at tasks like cybersecurity because they're the government, but then when folks actually interact with specific government IT employees, they have tons of stories of pure incompetence. I know a number of folks who served in USDS or 18-F, and their descriptions of the career government IT folks and software developers was hilariously bad ("Your first step when interacting with a government employee: figure out how much this person has just completely given up on life"). It makes sense when the very top of the government pay scale (GS-15 step 10 in DC) makes less than a fresh out of college L3 at Google in Silicon Valley. Why would anyone decent work for the government when they pay like that?