I used to do work via a contracting company for almost 2 years as a contractor. The federal employees could not program in Visual BASIC, work with Access or Oracle databases, and convert code from Clipper to Visual BASIC. So instead they hired contractors. I found that most of the Federal Employees at that time were ready for retirement and did not want to learn new things. They refused to learn the new GUI based programs that were easier to use than the Clipper DOS based programs they used to run.

I imagine that other positions may have to be by contract only, as no federal employee or military employee has the qualifications for it or want to be qaulified. It seems when they get a job for life, they have no interest in learning new things, well mostly anyway.

The sad part would be if they start hiring in H1B Visa workers to do that job, like they do for IT Workers.