Which is atrocious, but under normal circumstances, it is reasonably clear that many are getting paid, but not working....
I'm a retired federal employee. I worked for the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) in 4 states. I started thinking about a career with one of the 4 federal natural resource agencies while in high school. I partially worked my way through college (my divorced mother could not finance it all) to receive a bachelor of science degree in forestry. Due to the financial situation I faced it took me 6 years to get through college. I became a seasonal USFS employee during a couple of summers I worked my butt of while I worked for the USFS as a seasonal. I wanted to stand out among other seasonals as the hardest working individual among them. I made sure I got along with people who didn't get along with a lot of people. The competition was stiff as many other seasonals were in the same situation as I was. After graduation I returned to the seasonal job I had been in. I was laid off for 3 months at the end of that season. I was picked up as a permanent employee the next year. I worked in fire management as a fire prevention technician.
After 4 years in that position I transferred out to become a trainee forester. I worked my butt off trying to make the ranger district of the National Forest I was working on better. This is when I began to work unpaid overtime, mainly on the long neglected 200+ mile trail system on the district. In some very remote and rugged terrain I walked every mile of trail and then wrote a public guidebook of the trails. That guidebook is still in use today. I remapped the trails on the topo maps that covered the ranger district. The guidebook and the maps were prepared on the job, using any time I could spare during normal working hours, but to finish the project required staying after the ranger station was closed so I logged a few hundred hours of unpaid overtime.
I transferred to the eastern Sierra where the job was quite demanding. In order to maintain being a reasonable amount of being behind on what needed to be done I worked many more hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime. I probably logged the most hours, but I was not alone, some of my coworkers worked past normal hours and came in on their days off. All of the employees working these hours were those who had to make a plan in high school to get into a college and get a degree in one of the natural resource sciences. None of us, in spite of the unpaid overtime could keep up to the demands placed on us. Much more needed to be done. My biggest frustration was not having enough time in the field, which I think gives you the knowledge of "the rhythms of the land." How the land and the facilities reacted to the climate and the uses by the public.
I wanted more field time, so I took a voluntary downgrade to get a job where one performance standard in my job was to be in the field 50-60% of the time. To use a metaphor I had been working as a lieutenant and transferred (downgraded) to a sergeant or field supervisor. I was working as the frontcountry (as opposed to backcountry or wilderness) supervisor. I had two permanent seasonals and with volunteers (both winter and summer) and seasonals I supervised 45-50 employees. The ranger district had heavy recreation use, most of it in the frontcounty and some very challenging recreation sites to manage. Many of the volunteers and seasonals were interested in the USFS, National Park Service or BLM as a career and worked their butts off just like I had at their stage of their careers. Every resource, timber, range management, special uses, lands (exchanges, purchases, etc.), management of a major ski resort and administration worked their butts off. There were 2-3 of us who stayed past normal hours and would finally turn off their office lights at 8-9 at night just trying to meet the demands placed on them and the agency. I logged more than a thousand hours of uncompensated overtime just trying to keep a lid on the demands of my job, many of those hours in the field working with the visiting public. This ranger district was known, nationwide, as a very busy, high demand workload location to work.
I wrote a desk reference covering every topic that came up in working with the public and the topography and features on the district. Most of that was done after hours. When it was done there was a reference everyone could use to provide information about every possible question that was asked of seasonal staff and the volunteers I supervised.
In ten years I worked about 1500 hours of uncompensated overtime. Due to my years on the job I received 26 days of vacation time per year. The trouble was, if I took it, there was the stress of getting ready to be gone and the stress of coming back and being behind on the job once again. There was a program where we could donate our vacation days to someone with either a personal or family situation that demanded they get more time off, such as a major illness, etc. I usually donated about half my vacation hours each year.
The other federal, state, county and municipal employees I worked with were almost, without exception, very hard workers and charged at their jobs with intensity. This was especially true in the two locations I worked at in California. Every employee had educations that matched the type of work they were in. Everyone of them worked unpaid overtime if the jurisdiction allowed them to. Employees of the California Department of Wildlife were particularly dedicated. Everyone of them, like my own agency's employees, were working a life plan. They got a college education in their desired field and planned to retire from the agency they were working for. All of them had more demands on them than they could possibly meet.
So your comment "reasonably clear that many are getting paid, but not working" is particularly offensive to me. You have just passed along a stereotype that is almost completely untrue. Sure, there are some bad apples in every agency barrel, but the hard working, dedicated employees far outnumber the bad examples. 
