I've known people working in federal government where firing them would be a serious problem, as in they're the only person who knows something quite important well enough.

Many of these people could get paid more in private industry. You're seriously underestimating niche knowledge of things and/or overestimating how well things are documented.

Thousands of employees isn't even that much for USDA. There's also good reason to have headquarters of organisations close to headquarters of other organisations. It just lowers efficiency (which they might be after)

Collecting watches isn't a hobby, it's pure consumerism. Sure many hobbies have (recently?) gotten way more people spending top dollars for no reason but with watch collecting there's nothing else. You're not tweaking the dials, you don't know how to make the watch, you just watch it and wear it while a technologically superior version is 500 times cheaper. There's also no natural shortage of them, they can make a trillion of these watches.

At least with cars or audio equipment there's some marginal benefits once you get to crazy numbers, not the case with watches.

This is what happens to your country when you don't really care about public services (in many cases they're looked down upon, just look at teachers, federal workers but also police). There's difficulty recruiting and retaining police officers in the US (i'd imagine anywhere but especially the US) because it's not seen as a good job. I'm not a huge believer in IQ but intelligent and capable people just can't be convinced to go into this line of work unless they truly care about their community (very rare). Just way more fun to go to the big city and work in an office with an AC.

I'm sure there's a million other reasons why people don't want this job, but this reflects in how harsh you can be on (new) agents.

Police just aren't doing their job in the US, who even knows what they're doing at this point. Basically no country had the post-covid driver issue as much as America. Some states basically halved fines lol, make them do their jobs.