All these people with "password123" as their password (and there's a bunch similar to that) should be fired. Sidney MacArthur, you work for the Navy and you have that as a password?
The reality is that employees can't be trusted to manage password strength. But it's trivial to implement a validation scheme that forces employees to be over a minimum length, use special characters, etc. Of course this is also not great -- and inevitably we'd see Pa$$word123 -- but it's at least a starting point.
Whoever wrote the code that stored these values in plaintext (if that is indeed the case) should definitely get the boot.
If this was the NSA or CIA I would fire them all and shoot the person who coded it. :o)