alt Hacker NewsThe reason bureaucracies seem efficient is that they must be able to (1) complete the mission reliably over long periods of time, in the face of (2) staff churn and loss, without (3) collapsing the first time a critical mass of experts leaves the org. This means you have to sacrifice systems that rely on the enthusiasm of "10x experts" in favor of systems that can reliably recruit talent (at GS salaries.) And this is before you get to the mountains of political crap placed on an org by elected leaders.
It is incredibly challenging to create orgs that reliably stay on-mission over many years.
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Companies manage to handle all 3 of those things without the inefficiently (or at least a lot less of it).
As for the terrible salaries and mountains of political crap, that's the real issue here. But these are changeable and shouldn't just be accepted as inevitable as is so often done by defenders of government bureaucracy.
Efficiency and resiliency are generally at opposite ends of a spectrum. COVID supply chain disruptions demonstrated that in spades