Yes, but a whole city would not consist of government buildings and the consistency of style is intentional -- so that you know that this is the Federal building of a certain period (most built during FDR days) when you are in the city. I would be opposed to all buildings looking like that, but it makes sense that federal buildings have a consistent style.

Modernism, by trying to have every building be "unique", ends up looking the same. Just like a random collection of colors always ends up looking like the same grey square, a city in which every building is a modernist building will look exactly the same like any other city, and there isn't really any difference between a modernist Federal Building, university office, Corporate Headquarters, Library, Opera, apartment building, post office, or steam-trunk distribution center. You can't really tell what it is by looking at it.

And another infuriating thing about modern architecture is that it's often very hard to find the entrances to these buildings. They are also random, not very large, and also don't signify their purpose. Is this the service entrance? Main entrance? Employee entrance? You have to walk right up to it and read the sign, because the shape and look of the entrance from a distance doesn't tell you. Traditional architecture, seeing as how it evolved in response to human needs, distinguishes these entrances, and often even the type of building can be determined by the entrance. You can do that if you give up the ability to design things from scratch but work with existing traditions, making small improvements to fix specific problems. Over time, the result is something highly optimized for the community, but at the expense of the individual architect's independence. That's basically what you get with tradition.

Modernism rejects this because it would limit the freedom of the architect. But that means everything becomes less legible for the user -- the one who pays for the building -- and these buildings are really uncomfortable because even the smartest architect isn't going to be able to solve as many problems as thousands of architects sharing their improvements over hundreds of years.

Finally they just don't last very long, are hard to maintain, and don't age gracefully. The concrete starts to crack, those glass panels get clouded over or stained -- not fun cleaning glass at weird angles 70 feet up. These buildings become eyesores quickly after the photographers take their snaps and the architect gets another page in their portfolio or coffee table book.

Just on a practical level, it's really hard to deal with these buildings -- they aren't comfortable for the people who have to visit them, walk around them, or live next to them. It seems like a step backwards because it is. You have modern buildings that don't handle rain well (create splashes and water damage when it rains), don't handle wind well (create wind tunnels instead of breaking them up), don't handle sun well (create hot spots and cast too many shadows), are not good for street life, not pleasing to look at, not easy to use, not easy to maintain, pleasant to enter and exit, pleasant to work in, not easy to modify -- all the problems that were solved by traditional architecture, solved uniquely in different traditions through a process of iteration -- come rearing back in the modern building. At best the modern building might solve one of these, but because of it's lack of memory, that solution wont be ported to the next modern building and refined further. This creates a dark age of architecture, where prize winning architects can't design buildings that are able to properly handle rainwater.

I am not trying to mandate any neo-classical style per se. But definitely architecture has veered off to an anti-human track, an egotistical track, and needs to be put back into the service of human needs and promoting life in the community. Certainly with taxpayer funded buildings this should be the case.