It is literally always cheaper for the government to hire people to do the job than it is to contract it out. If anyone in Congress or the White House actually cared about bringing down government spending, or about waste, fraud, and abuse, they'd take an axe to the contracting world. Bring jobs back to the public sector. You'd save money and the work would get done quicker and better. Plus, you can actually hold people accountable for mistakes, unlike contracting.

This is the MIC working as designed.

The article clearly says that it's because they had a hiring freeze, is not like they just couldn't hire enough people.

That'll save some money.