> whose primary qualification was being hired at a "friendly" tech company and making the right kind of joke around the CEO

That’s being awfully dismissive of the individuals skill set. Nobody gets the job by making the right kind of jokes around the CEO. Nobody. Getting in the door takes hard work, talent and some amount of luck.

By function a GS will ALWAYS be subordinate to a political appointee and there’s nothing they can do about it

I posted elsewhere that I left a govt career as a military officer precicely because of this reality. It’s like a old boring joke now that politicians are corrupt and worthless.

I will tell you from the inside that not only is it true but it’s 10 times to 100 times worse than you think it is.

I have multiple stories of operational systems, functions, whatever you wanna call them that we’re working exceptionally well had good backing, good funding and were completely wiped out because whoever became the deputy under secretary for that budget line decided they didn’t want to do it anymore. and completely shelved decades worth of work. Like literally I remember having to unplug a server that was running life-critical beacons for POWs because they weren’t being used enough.

As if that weren’t enough that same development problem then shifted over to some new hot organization that is in the politicians jurisdiction and then they start over from scratch with none of the learning from the previous admin.

There is no positive system that can be affected by the United States government

It does not exist, they cannot functionally or structurally exist, because the government of the United States but is not and has never been built on supporting citizens or the global community it is built and has always been built to support wealthy politicians and that’s all.

I’m not aware of how every other countries work but the ones I’ve seen the inside are the same

Going into the government for the “mission” is probably the most intentionally ignorant thing somebody could do given the plethora of easily accessible data proving exactly this

GS grade does not correspond directly to manager/managee relationships at plenty of federal agencies. Someone getting hired at a higher GS grade is not automatically “over you” in the formal reporting hierarchy. That’s not to say this never happens (GS:org chart level is the case more often than not, I’d guess), but it’s not a given.

Now, if your issue is that agencies sometimes offer high (by the standards of current employees) GS grades to attract talented hires, then I agree that is a problem! The solution to that is to improve government pay scales and fix fed hiring more generally: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/dear-mr-kupor-please-fix-fede...

Until that is done, (good) policies like the Pendleton Act cannot help that much.

I was hired in under HQE accession in 2019 and made SES 4 equivalent with zero civilian time in service.