I have to respectfully disagree. I've been through positions in both the public and private sector. ESG was the first (and only) public sector position I've been in that is actually like what people imagine work in the public sector to be like. Nothing productive to do, but the pressure to look busy and pretend like you know what you're doing is real. If you've either been in ESG or on the private sector end interacting with ESG, you'll probably get what I mean. For those in the private sector now, you can get a sense of what I mean by seeing how "smoothly" they have been processing the Circuit Breaker exemption requests.

Although to be fair, it could just be due to the department I joined, and the departments that I had interactions with back then. Things could also have changed. So take it with a healthy serving of salt if you will.