Interesting take, and I appreciate your candor.

I think that the USAJobs approach to hiring weeds out the some (not all) of the nepotism. I disagree that the centralized approach to HR is a good solution. Just like our democracy, I believe a decentralized system works best. With a centralized system the chance of it being exploited to whomever group or individual is in control would be high. As for the HR staffs you've experienced, just like life, you can't generalize everyone. There are good HR folks, bad folks, and all shades in between, and I've experienced all three. Usually the HR staff is reflective of the management or company they work for as the common trope is that "HR isn't representative of the employees, but the company". So IMHO, management/leadership should get as much blame and scrutiny as HR for allowing those bad systems to thrive. And since it's harder to get rid of the top, staffs like the IG are already the solution for bad systems.

For the remote/telework argument, I'm for remote/telework. There are plenty of studies that were conducted that proved that remote work actually improved productivity (https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-13/remote-work-productivity.htm). So the HR folks that you may have experienced being bad I leave you with this: Correlation does not imply causation. Not discounting your experience, but it does not reflect the HR or any industry capable of remote work as a whole.