I heard from one manager at state level that they were going to get another $2k+ per veteran hired as incentives for their department. I do not know if it's illegal or even totally false but the manner in which the financial incentives was candidly discussed made me question the veteran incentive system with grave concern regardless of what written laws / policies say things are supposed to be. There's thousands of stories where civilians get let go from contractors while rank and file veterans are still kept employed. There's some gaming of "disabilities" for everything from IBS to ADHD that can be decisive factors in hiring I know of personally as well that are nonsensical.

For civil service applicants, you can be completely ignored as a well-qualified applicant if you're not a veteran on many, many job postings (particularly GS 7-9 from what I can observe) as well as contract bids due to the volume of veterans applying. If you have 4 billets and 100 veterans apply and 200 civilians (all "qualified"), there will be no interview for a civilian until enough veterans fail the interviews. This is notably different from most affirmative action systems based around quotas I've heard of. Most people that support the veteran system have benefited from it directly or have never had to turn down qualified civilians from consideration talking to hiring managers, so I don't think a fair discussion can be advanced any direction without going into a really long (government-commissioned, ha) study.

You can't compete for a major contract ($50M+) without a veteran present on a contract among primes (why wouldn't you when you have 10k+ employees?) and the usual suspect major contractors - you don't have enough points probably to make up for that when the quantified terms of competition put everyone remotely competent very close on points. If you don't have a veteran as a head, you're probably a subcontractor to a prime and you're going to be handling most of the boots on the ground engineering dirty work. When everyone routinely winds up rating highest in fulfilling the contract, the folks that got extra credit win by default. Heck, the number of PhDs on staff and number of veterans are considered criteria of selection for many contracts even if none of those PhDs or veterans can be expected to be put on the contract (doesn't matter if the PhDs are in English or computer science!). I've been in several contract bidding strategy meetings where it's abundantly clear that despite all the regulations around privileged access that it is routinely violated with only the most egregious cases resulting in prosecution / disqualification.

The SETA system is pretty interesting but has been thoroughly abused by a lot of people up and down the beltway to short-circuit advance their careers into leadership positions despite (interesting enough) no actual prior government experience or even no successful projects consulted for. If my sorry ass can be strongly considered for several SETA positions, something is wrong with the system meant to emphasize meritocracy as well.

With all that said, I have nothing for or against veterans in a business context - they're just people with skills that have varying relevance and strength. I just see little reason to factor that into anything important like whether to interview someone for a federal position that has zero to do with the military (Smithsonian museum of all places has veteran's preferences for many positions, are we going to have curators in combat zones trying to disarm IEDs? Is a tour guide expected to be able to take down an active shooter without a firearm?).

My criticisms of federal government for applies to large private sector companies as well. I really don't view the public v. private distinction as something like a quasi-Keynsian retirement portfolio of bonds v. stocks at all - there are high risk parts of public sector and low risk parts of private sector, and they tend to correlate very strongly with organizational size.

If there has indeed been a focus on "long-term thinking" in public sector, the sheer number of failed projects with such poor quality output of "successes" should have been remediated somewhat after decades of experience managing enterprise-scale IT projects led by a disproportionate number of PhDs and "government-skilled" veterans had their valuable input while our "short-term" focused private sector would be drowning in operational costs and plagued with problems for every large company and only getting worse. Instead, public IT projects are getting wider in scope and demands ever higher with the Pentagon's procurement strategy now shifting to greater non-traditional private sector sourcing due to exorbitant costs and poor results from their usual contractors.