My first job out of school was with the US government. I'm speaking from experience. It is worse than you could possibly imagine. Onion levels of absurdity, snake oil levels of effectiveness.

Being young and naive I, at first, thought it was just an isolated case of astonishing incompetence but I came to realize it was actually accepted as normal and good practice across many parts of government.

Once my idealism about civil service wore off I got out of there as fast as possible.