I'm not going to say the wages are fine but the issue is likely not to be the competence of the IT staff, but rather the overbearing IT management processes the U.S. Federal government uses. "Enterprise change management" processes separate from the already-long cybersecurity review processes can add weeks or even months to system updates.
In that kind of construct, you optimize for fewer but larger changes and then it's no surprise to see that there's no time in the project update schedule to update the OS in addition to making all the other long-overdue library / middleware / application changes that also are pending once a change finally can be made.
(rare exception: Gov.uk government digital services; while they're not used for all projects, they are exactly the sort of committed and competent public servants we need more of)
It's a good time to be kind to your neighbors. No matter their background, they're almost certainly not the ones to be upset at.
That said, they should have migrated it years ago.