Employee headcount is not a good proxy for actually accomplishing the tasks government is expected to do. Your DOT has a huge number of employees, but I can say from first hand knowledge that none of the staff engineers actually design anything. They manage and administer projects, and they attend a lot of meetings and spend a lot of hours in the office, but they probably don’t actually do the things you care about as a taxpayer: deliver infrastructure improvements. Contractors manage the programs, plan the jobs, design the jobs, build the job, and inspect the job. State employees might do maintenance, and they will do it with 3-5X the headcount of the contractors.