Congress sets salaries and benefits for government positions, but most of those jobs are under the executive branch. So the president can't just increase the head of cybersecurity's salary to $1M, that has to be approved by Congress. The DoD and intelligence agencies get around these restrictions by contracting out the technical work, but the problem is the top decision makers still don't make nearly enough to attract real experts in the field.
In the government agency I'm employed with, the cyber security manager for our products has only a logistics management background. The information assurance personnel are contractors, but they don't have much impact on the real decision making.
In the government agency I'm employed with, the cyber security manager for our products has only a logistics management background. The information assurance personnel are contractors, but they don't have much impact on the real decision making.