It's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it how absurd government work can be. I was briefly on the 2020 census project as a sub-sub-sub-contractor.

The Census Bureau has access to IRS data and generated most statistics like unemployment rate for the government. So lots of PII and therefore strict background checks.

All good except that they hired people before the checks were done. And the checks were slow so people were waiting months before getting access to systems.

That's pretty bad, but at the start at least we were in meetings. We couldn't do anything without system access but at least we could get up to speed on the project and provide general advice.

Someone somewhere got word of that and one day there were armed Federal agents outside the offices. No badge = no entry and thus ended our participation at all in the project.

But it did not end our getting paid. I was flying into DC costing $2kish in expenses per week and I think I was being billed out at nearly $8k a week (I got $2.5kish of that). If I tried to do any actual work for that money someone would have literally shot me.

That went on for months because the background checks took that long. There were dozens of us in that situation and several hundred thousand in government money was burned for literally no benefit.

I don't know exactly where that project ended up but it did not get used for the 2020 census.