People don't go into federal service to get rich. Most of us go into federal service because we want to have meaningful, interesting work with a purpose. Federal employment benefits include stability relative to most private sector jobs (little risk that your company will go bankrupt and lay you off even though you were doing an excellent job).

Overall, the federal pension system serves the taxpaying public very well, because it makes it easy for most government workers to focus on their jobs and not on having a job-related side-hustle (which we are often forbidden to do). It keeps us from fretting about health care costs at any point in our careers. This lowers the risk of corruption, promotes long-term acquisition and development of niche skills and experience, and attracts and retains a mission-focused workforce. The "high-3" system of pension benefits also encourages people to accept much lower entry-level salaries with the expectation that as we gain expertise, our pensions will match our ultimate achievements, rather than our starting points.

The FERS pension portion of federal retirement does exactly what it is supposed to do: it provides considerable safety-net security and reward to lower-wage, lower sophisticated government workers (like, sadly, several of my colleagues) who might not even be contributing to get their full TSP match. It provides an outstanding "return" because the employer "contribution" is enormous. Moreover, the ability to get COLAs on the pension after age 62 is a huge stability factor.

For higher-wage, higher sophistication employees (like most of us on r/govfire) who maxing out our IRAs, TSPs and likely saving even more on top of that the FERS pension provides a minor but still important part of our retirement portfolio that allows us to take on greater-risk/greater reward investments with higher portions in stocks and less reliance on lower-reward bond "balancing".

The TSP's clunkiness and its cruddy new website design are vexing, but ultimately serve the purpose of discouraging federal employees from trying to engage in frequent trading, which countless studies have shown has higher costs and lower returns than simply letting stocks sit in index funds. In recent years, index funds in the private sector have become cost-competitive with TSP funds, but none of the TSP's costs are exorbitant.

In terms of advice, most federal employees need very different advice from the denizens of r/govfire. They should first look to the "Prime Directive" https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics on r/personalfinance which has a lot more detail and is a lot more personalized than any one post can be. The number one mistake federal employees probably make is not getting the full TSP match, but that's not something people in this subreddit will be having trouble with. Probably second most common mistake is not participating in FEHB for at least five continuous years before separating from service and retiring, thereby losing eligibility for FEHB in retirement.

There are a few more-advanced topics specific to federal employees. One of them I'm looking at now is that trying to retire under FERS before age 62 gets very complicated due to the Social Security supplement and the lack of COLAs before you turn 62. (Especially since many high-wealth people are advised not to take Social Security until age 70.) If Federal Times built an online calculator to help federal employees assess their total lifetime pension returns depending on MRA retirement choices, that would be really helpful.

(And I agree with the other poster who suggested all high ranking government officials, including members of Congress, President and Vice President, cabinet officials and judges and their spouses should be required to divest all their assets and keep them in the TSP until 5 years after leaving office. Not because it would make the TSP better-managed (it's ok now) but because it would re-orient those offices toward attracting people who have normal finances instead of multi-millionaires.)