At a company that has to have regular layoffs instead of whining for more government contracts?
The assumption you make is that they wouldn't seek commercial contracts if they could. Atlas and Delta infrequently compete for commercial launches because Russian and Chinese vehicles are so much cheaper. The current version of each rocket was designed for minimum cost from the heritage expertise available in the mid to late 90s when they were conceived. SpaceX, starting from zero infrastructure and technical heritage, designed an even cheaper vehicle since they didn't have a bias toward an existing solution.
So Delta and Atlas require a set number of labor hours, no less. The only way to decrease the price is a dismantling of the aerospace wage structure, which is affected by FAR clauses that protect unions and the GS scale of the civil servants doing the mission assurance work.
You can wish this isn't so or make a cynical stereotyped assumption, but it doesn't make you right.
Sorry about the cynical posts - they are directed at the system and not at people. My cynicism comes form my own experience - long ago I worked in the aerospace industry, more recently the semiconductor industry. They can't be more different.
Imagine designing semiconductor tools - they are more complicated than rocket engines, more sophisticated, have more parts including banks of computers and plcs, dangerous chemicals, robots, annealing ovens, plating baths, vacuum chambers, and so on ... Humans never touch the product inside these machines. They have to run 24/7.
Once or twice a year your machine will go head to head with a competitor's on the fab floor to see which can run more wafers. This is done prior to large contracts being awarded. The manufacture requires that the bus sized tools be essentially plug-and-play replaceable among the competitors. You don't have years and billions to analyze your plasma chamber, you have weeks or months and you have to know a little calculus instead of how to run a custom piece of software that cost $100 million in taxpayer funded research. You make do with what you have, and if you are really smart and good at what you do, you keep your job. By the next competition, your machine will have to be much faster.
The semiconductor industry has a global market is around $300 billion, aerospace - even more. They are both high tech endeavors. So why does the semiconductor industry move at light speed compared to companies like PWR? Despite PWR's tens of billions of government funded research, a 50 year history of design experience and custom computer code and testing methods - working on machines that haven't changed significantly in decades? The answer is clear to anyone who's worked in both industries.
The aerospace industry is, in many cases, government directed. Competition is encumbered with secrecy laws and corporate executive strategies. Some of these machines are not worth the expense for private industry to do it on their own, not without billions in government funded R&D. This might be because the government and manufacturer set performance requirements that few can achieve, even though it isn't really needed. The government doesn't require head-to-head competition of product that can easily replace each other in a plug-n-play fashion. The executives at these companies have it good - and they know it - it's not in their interest to foster competition, work any faster, take risks or make things less expensively. Certain products enjoy monopolies, for decades.
After talking with space industry insiders here for a few months, it's clear that some of these people believe they know all the answers, and they are smug in their certainty that no one outside the industry can possible understand. But in reality, they have no clue what's it's like out in the real world.