Comment by ein0p

There are all sorts of other forms of indirect (and at times direct) bribery practiced in the US. You wouldn’t get anyone competent to “serve the public” if their official salaries were their entire compensation. So your options are either incompetence or corruption, or, at times, both. The reason you’re not directly exposed to this is you aren’t making any requests of them. Eg for elected officials 100% of the time I write to them I receive a canned response that shows nobody has even read what I wrote. I strongly suspect this would work very differently if I made large campaign contributions