Sadly this is really common even in surrounding government agencies. I got hired by the state of New Jersey and it took almost 6 months to start. Not to mention the pay is incredibly low I cannot afford to survive solely on my salary. Historically government work attracted people with good benefits but you were still supposed to be able to live on the salary even if it wasn’t as comfortable of a life.

You can’t pay your bills with health insurance so I’m not surprised people don’t want to work for government agencies when the hiring process takes half a year; you get paid laughably low wages, and you may never even get the pension you’re supposed to get.

If they paid workers more that would partially fix recruitment(and get more people in HR to actually get the onboarding process to be quicker) however that’s a non starter with the public. So government institutions continue to wither away their job base.