Comment by dnesting

The simple answer here is that government agencies are funded by congressional appropriations and salaries are regulated. The "government" may be rich, but that doesn't imply that it's easy to pay people market rates, and even if it were, there's a finite budget out of which to pay them that could instead be used to hire more people.

In many ways I'm actually glad this situation exists: it has the effect of filtering out people that care more about their market worth than the mission.