I think that incentive is part of the problem. Federal employees should get paid more with a reasonable expectation of being fired. The amount of people I know in government positions who give 0 consideration to the quality of their work because they know they won’t be fired astounds me.

The advocates of Musk's firings will say that if these people could command a higher salary, they should be in the private industry producing goods and services for the population rather than the inherently wasteful government positions.

And this is the thing, the rest of the world has agreed to be dependent on American companies, because they believed in the legitimacy of the US and free international trade. If belief in that legitimacy goes away, we will see that dependence shift quickly. Let us begin with Mastercard and Visa where the US taxes every payment transaction in much of the world. Do we really believe that Europe couldn't run its own card schemes?

There's going to be major efforts especially in Europe, to de-couple from the US. We saw this to some extent in Trump 1.0 but he didn't actually do much due to the ineptness of those around him and a Senate that was still dominated by the anti-MAGA GOP "old guard". This time it is much, much worse.

What a giant scam the whole program is. Corporations need a good finding out phase again

All key personnel were immigrants? Why did the others come back? Also, since the H1B were key to operations and therefore smart, couldn't at least some of them have found a new employer? 61% of the H1B population switched jobs that year, so why did all key H1B come back?

I think key personnel came back because they wanted to. It's the simplest explanation.