I think you are confused about the delineation between local and federal governments. It's not all one giant pool of tax money. None of Santa Clara County's budget goes to missiles.

Also, this feels like you are too capitalism-pilled, and rather than just spending the $240 to do this work, and using the remaining $49,999,760 to just fund free college or UBI programs, you're like, "how about we pay these people to do the most mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly boring work there is, reading old legal documents?"

You know what would actually happen if you did that? People would seriously read through them for 1 day, and then they'd be like, "clear", "clear", "clear" without looking at half of them. It's not like you're gonna find and fund another group to review the first group's work, after all. So you'd still be where we are now, but you also wasted x* peoples' time that they could have been enjoying doing literally anything else.