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One only need look at the public service itself.

Go back a couple of generations and it was mostly filled with people who did things. It had an administrative component yes but if you worked for government then most likely you were someone who did something physically. Indeed a good portion of our past tradespeople did their apprenticeships with government authorities - electricity, gas, railway and other machinery workshops, traffic signals, housing commission, etc. Just about all privatised or outsourced today.

My grandfather ran a materials testing lab within government. Because someone had sensibly realised that regularly testing samples of the materials used in construction of government projects would be a good idea so as to minimise the chance of future problems. Needless to say that idea's long gone.

Plenty more like that. Technical knowledge has been broadly purged out of government, replaced with a focus on law and administration.