We regularly have the same here in the UK - "let's go after £1.7b in benefits fraud" but never "lets go after the £120b in taxes that are evaded". We lost more to COVID fraud than we did to benefits fraud, but seem to have just written that off largely - it even seems to have been committed by people in our House of Lords.
I am all for doing both these things - but let's go after the biggest prize(s) first.
If you eliminate the contractors, the work doesn't get done. So either you give up on getting the things done (which is illegal, since the things are federal law) or you nationalize the contractors (which will save some money, but not the entire current budget).
We can definitely save some money if we stop demonizing federal employees, and imagining that we can improve it by creating a new layer of middle-men by privatizing the same work. But for that matter, we could save a lot of money by taking what the government does seriously, instead of as a combination football, whipping-boy, and trough.
Its that old trope where a powerful group lobbies something in a screeching way until discussion turns to the aspects of doing exactly that which actually affect those same powerful people and the joke is "we didnt mean like that"
I agree that the spectrum of "effort needed" is not the same as "clarity of process", and ideally people wouldn't blur the lines... But it happens anyway.
For example: Moving a heavy exercise-weight one mile in a straight line through an open field field is very straightforward... but not necessarily easy.
I am all for doing both these things - but let's go after the biggest prize(s) first.