At various times I have spent a total of nearly three years inside the Federal bureaucracy, though never a true "civil servant" as I was never permanent. But I worked with the true civil service, made friends there, talked about the nature of the culture, and learned a lot in the process.
If you're wondering why the government employment is bloated, one reason is the more people you supervise - what in business they call "direct reports" - the higher your pay grade is likely to be. If you supervise people who themselves supervise others, it goes even higher. Thus it is to your advantage to grow the workforce reporting to you.
Another reason you want more workers is that you will almost inevitably have some subordinates who are ineffective but who for one reason or another you cannot fire. Perhaps they are DEI hires, are "connected," or are careful not to give you evidence to use against them. Plus, the organizational culture discourages firing people by making it quite difficult to do.
So you hire another person to do the work the loser should be doing. They sit there on your payroll doing very little but their very presence increases the number you supervise and that alone is good for you personally, if not good for the agency or the taxpayer.
There are also some very talented people who work for the Feds, and they are often as irritated by their do-nothing colleagues as you would be. Be glad they exist.
Inevitably some of these winners will be cut when the Musk whirlwind sweeps a lot of losers out of the government service. It happens with some frequency in the private sector. A desire to avoid this sort of collateral damage is another reason for civil service bloat.
