Eh. It is more complicated than that. I started out in DIA and a lot of government employees in the "hacker space" are indeed underpaid compared to their civilian counterparts. The way the sausage is really made though is through contracting, and these folks are paid. Bottom line is that if you want to do cyberspace stuff for uncle sam and want to be paid the you shouldn't be going to any careers/*.gov website. Look instead for generic "Network Operations Engineer" type postings that are in Herndon, Bethesda, Baltimore, Annapolis Junction, Fort Meade, and so on.
There are some perks to being a government employee, but you end up in the government framework for pay and what not, which sucks. if I recall correctly the folks at CIA (AFD I believe???) had some sort of system set up where they hired government employees as a POCO billet or something so they could bring talent in at a reasonable pay scale, and then they'd do some political maneuvering to rotate people around so everyone was getting paid. DIA was a charlie foxtrot in that arena and probably still is, so I'd avoid them. The FBI has a pretty good team in quantico, though I'm guessing again that most of the are really just Booz employees.
There are some perks to being a government employee, but you end up in the government framework for pay and what not, which sucks. if I recall correctly the folks at CIA (AFD I believe???) had some sort of system set up where they hired government employees as a POCO billet or something so they could bring talent in at a reasonable pay scale, and then they'd do some political maneuvering to rotate people around so everyone was getting paid. DIA was a charlie foxtrot in that arena and probably still is, so I'd avoid them. The FBI has a pretty good team in quantico, though I'm guessing again that most of the are really just Booz employees.