They all have committee assignments, so let's say your boss sits on Armed Services. A few weeks into your new job, you get a call from the Pentagon. They want to brief you on a new weapons system they'd like to procure. It's part of your job to be up on this stuff, so you attend. They make sure you just happen to meet a couple of Pentagon staffers who used to work for Congress but who now have much better-paying and more secure positions.
Same ploy works at all levels of government.
And with the media. That's one of the biggest reasons the media generally just print the official hand-outs and call it news. And that's how it works in local government, too. We don't remember Janet Marcus as being anything besides a trained seal for whatever City Water wanted. That same lawsuit revealed internal documents showing the U.S. Forest Service had been planning to evict the shooters from their longtime Sabino Canyon-area digs.