Yep, this is 100% a lie.

They're so afraid of looking weak by admitting fault they'd rather look incompetent by claiming the US Government doesn't know how to contact the people in charge of our nukes.

Yeah, same thing happened when Musk fired a bunch of critical Twitter people.

unionize as consultants

The two groups don't often overlap. That's like "flying as sharks".

Consultants, but their nature, may have drastically-reduced job security, something people usually want from a union when they can't get it from their government.

They're unionized but lack the ability to strike.

And, yes, it does make the union largely useless. They can file lawsuits, and cite law, and involve themselves in employee arbitration, but that only matters when the opposition engages in good faith.

In my professional experience it's most specifically people with a sales and sales-like background (which includes grifters).

People whose speciality is "wheeling and dealing" are horrible at managing anything whose success criteria is not purely based on convincing other people of something, so basically anything were actual things must be created, made, distributed and so on.

Since they can't actually make things work, they instead try and manipulate perception around it to convince others that things are working or for them to do it for them, and the former only holds for a while whilst problems accumulate and things eventually fail in an too-big-to-be deniable way (at which point they try to dump the blame on somebody else), whilst the latter when done by somebody supposedly leading something just yields a parasite manager that doesn't manage and whose selection of manpower is based on how easy it is to manipulate their "underlings" rather than competence, so things get badly done but said "manager" can't actually tell until it's too late.

"I don't know what's scarier, that it's happened, or that it happens often enough that there's a word for it."

Until they decide to fire you again.