I'd take ONE top faang engineer over 8 government software contractors. There's so much tribal knowledge out there that people in the Midwest just don't have, not to mention a can-do attitude.
It blew my mind the first time I worked with a guy from Microsoft on something. We were having issues with some code, and he just popped open the kernel and started actively debugging things that I'd only vaguely even heard about. I feel like I was twice as good at engineering after that experience alone.
I had the same experience from the other direction later on.. a team of smart, hard-working coders had been dealing with stability/perf issues for years on some product. I was able to root cause and straighten all of them out in a couple of weeks, even though this was in an area of software development using a set of tools I'd never touched before.
I'll bet a single FAANG-hardened code wizard could outperform 20 or 30 government coders.