For sure - culture is a huge component. Government is unique in that incompetence and laziness and all the shitty behaviors that get people canned in the real world don't have an impact on money coming in. In some places, revenue increases steadily, completely decoupled from any sort of functional attachment to value.

So you can be a terrible, worthless, lazy, no-good, do-nothing, awful employee, skating by on the bare minimum level of effort, checking whatever set of boxes you need to avoid getting fired outright, make sure you kiss the appropriate asses and put on a show when you need to, and because there's no direct, immediate, obvious negative consequence to the overall organization, it's not worth the enormous effort it would take to fire you. If managers that care somehow get into leadership positions, people get shuffled off to a corner somewhere, assigned duties where they won't have a negative impact on morale or operations while the real, actual working employees do what they can.

If one of these fake-work employees ends up as a manager, through inertia and organizational default and seniority, the culture is guaranteed to be toxic, and because they're expert box checkers and ass kissers, they know how to put on a good show of "yep, everything's fine right here!" for whoever they need to report to. I've worked for all sorts of awful bosses, but awful government boss under an awful government department under this type of civil-service kabuki was the worst. Nothing destroys the spirit of a good leader faster than an entrenched department full of clever lifers who can't be fired or motivated or penalized because they've got the entire system gamed to their advantage.

You can, and do, get management and employees all throughout government that actually do give a shit and do good work. I'm not saying all the jobs are fake or useless. I do think a majority are fake and useless, and if you had a market dynamic that allowed competition and merit to reinforce strategy and weed out bad actors, you'd get a much leaner, more effective government overall.

Won't matter much longer, though. AI can already do better, faster, more reliable work than nearly all government workers, including the elected ones. I'd rather have Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok based agents as representatives at this point, over whatever this flaming feces clown show is we've had going on for decades. Even with the jailbreaks.

Some government employees do. Lots of local, state, and federal departments fall under more or less permanent bureaucracatic institutions, and while they might follow the lead of an elected official, often those officials are far more ceremonial than functional.

When those departments are part of public sector unions, they're even further removed from any sort of quality based feedback loops.

Some government staff follow politicians. A whole shit ton of more or less permanent staff put in for lifelong careers, doing boring work that has nothing to do with politics, that gets funded on autopilot, because the IT department is needed, because the DMV, and birth records, and GIS and all those functional, boring bureaucratic departments don't directly fall under, or benefit from constant cycling through with each change of political leadership.

They're protected from arbitrary firing by political leadership - no consequences for being wasteful or incompetent, even if the politician du jour really really wants to make changes or campaigned on it.

Any sort of legislative reining in of that cadre of careerists has to wrangle with unions and general public resistance to messing with "civil servants" - optics are easy to game, and it's easy to garner sympathy. The politics are rough, and not worth the fight for many politicians.

What you're describing with the performance reviews and the like sounds like it's not unionized, and/or your local legislators have been making moves to bring some accountability and actual real world feedback loops into the system. Good on them. That's not anywhere close to the norm in the US.