Agencies are well known to not pay competitively, even in IT roles, but when I think about the obvious solution which is to pay more, I immediately think of the uproar and accusations that would come with a government official getting what some might consider a 'lavish' wage even if it is industry standard for the skillset.

I'm looking at this to be possible more like when you have company wide phishing tests going through the emails, and it catches Brenda the new person in accounting who's still on their probationary period.

That's what contractors are for. Snowden was making something like $150k for a fairly basic sysadmin role, and I'd imagine he was nowhere near the top of the contractor pay scale. That is a whole separate issue though, with contracting companies acting as middlemen taking a fat cut, often just for knowing the right people. Not to mention the issue of having a revolving door between the private and government parts of the military industrial complex, like with the SecDef being a former Raytheon board member (and before that, a general).

If the Snowden personal W-2 gross was 150k, booz was almost certainly charging the nsa $285k for him. Pretty standard federal contacting markup for a "body shop" agency.

And just like every other case in US government contracting, the american people overpay for pretty standard functionality because half of the citizens think it's unconscionable for the government to do anything.

When going through the security clearance background check for NSA, it's the FBI who investigates. It used to be the previous 7 years, neighbors and pretty much all acquaintances. It's extremely tedious figuring all that out when just out of grad school, for example.

Yeah I found this a little confusing as well. They surely knew about the previous bankruptcy mentioned, and the current debt during their security clearance check. That'd surely be a big red flag for high level clearance.