You don't even need to kill it. Just install enough hooks and backdoors and whole purpose is defeated. No one really checks what is running except few developers, there are no audits or checks and balances to insure code integrity.
When you say "the government", you're implying that the US, the Netherlands, and Belgium will join forces to extort all of the core devs (to say nothing of other eyes on the project) to insert a back door? If that's likely to happen (it's not), I doubt any additional audits (which could also be influenced in the same way) would be of any help. (I agree you're correct in principle though.)
So, also a single point of failure.
Putting aside the unlikelihood that all versions, forks, and clones of Bitcoin Core have been backdoored (in a way that apparently can't be reversed), btcd is at least one full-node alternative, re-implemented from the ground up, which supports getblocktemplate: https://github.com/conformal/btcd/wiki#Mining. It's quite an ambitious project, you should take a look.