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The DC suburbs are the richest in the country. What part of that indicates lower compensation?
It seems more like, instead of lower compensation, it's simply lower standards, and the job security incentivizes the layabouts, the malingerers, and the otherwise unsuitable who could not command anywhere near the same remuneration anywhere else.
The DC suburbs are indeed very rich relative to a lot of the country, but it's not the federal employees who are holding up that average. The most a typical federal employee can make in DC is $191,900 as a GS15 Step 7-10 (note that $191,900 is a hard cap government wide and DC has one of the highest locality pay adjustments of any city in the country). That's a great salary by most standards, but bear in mind that GS15 positions are rare (most feds will retire never having reached a GS15 position) and you may gain one step a year after earning the position (OPM claims it takes on average 18 years to reach Step 10).
On top of that, as you say the DC suburbs are some of the richest in the country, and it's consequently incredibly expensive to live here. So while that $191,900 looks good, it's just getting into the range where you could comfortably buy a non-"fixer upper" house inside the Beltway without needing a contribution from your spouse's salary.
There are numerous industries in DC where you could make more with less experience like tech, law, defense contracting, lobbying, general federal contracting etc. Consider that those last three are all industries whose existence is predicated on their ability to suckle from the federal teat. If there's any villain in the story of modern government inefficiency I'd suggest we look at the contractors before we start vilifying the feds.
Federal pay scale for DC: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/salary-tables/pdf/2024/DCB.pdf
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