Overpaid Federal Bureaucrats, and Contractors

The Dana Priest/William Arkin series in the Post on the post 9/11 national security complex has many points of interest.  But one today is as a counter to the idea that federal employees are overpaid.  At least in the national security field, contractor employees get about 25 percent more than federal.  Admittedly, this sounds like a top of the head estimate and probably does not include fringe benefits, but no federal employee ever got a BMW:

Contractors can offer more money - often twice as much - to experienced federal employees than the government is allowed to pay them. And because competition among firms for people with security clearances is so great, corporations offer such perks as BMWs and $15,000 signing bonuses, as Raytheon did in June for software developers with top-level clearances.