I find cover letters and resumes to be useless. Really a waste of everyone's time like the whole hiring process.

I only had to deal with this when I worked as a government contractor. Sometimes it went like "I did so and so and these kind of tasks" OK, I don't really care. You're going to be doing postal service on base. "I graduated from here with a masters" I don't give a shit. "These are my references" I didn't ask, but thanks for wasting my time, I'm not calling them, I'm going to run a background check on you anyway.

All I cared about is if your S/TS clearance was still valid and that you're not annoying. Bonus points if asked why do you want to work here and the answer is money, though you might get some extra attention from the FSO for a while.