Note that this is logically impossible; if they can afford to pay Anduril to hire those people, they can more easily afford to hire the same people themselves.
GS-12/13 is a common working level for these jobs. Even on the cyber side which gets a 25% or so incentive pay on top, it's not competitive with what industry would pay. And only a handful of truly critical programs might, might, be able to get GS-14/15 billets for their technical staff, that'll still only be for SMEs with years of experience or certain key skillsets. Above GS you start requiring congressional appointments as well, and they aren't going to setup hearings so they can pay people over $200k, it's easier to get a contractor willing to pay that much.
> 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.
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.
Almost no one in tech gets into SES, and they wouldn't want to -- SESs don't write software.