Institutional rot is extremely expensive, and large institutions eventually wither away because of it. That pressure exists whether or not companies are aware o

Institutional rot is extremely expensive, and large institutions eventually wither away because of it. That pressure exists whether or not companies are aware of it/proactive about cutting it out. I think the problems with government controlled projects are better generalized as problems with incentives and accountability in large organizations. It’s possible to get it right, but the bigger an organization gets, and the less existential pressure it feels/the more it can let problems fester without consequence, the more problems will occur. The most stereotypical example is the soviet union. There was no accountability, and production and quality problems were endemic to pretty much every sector under government control. Cars, food, housing, clothing, energy, etc, were all behind the west, and became increasingly behind the longer things went on. The soviet union was a particularly horrible government, but the US government also has plenty of inefficiencies. The SLS project has been dragging for eons, while SpaceX has been accelerating rapidly. Virtually no one pays taxes directly through government interfaces; they all use private services like TurboTax because they’re much simpler to use and more user friendly that what the government provides. Publicly funded job training programs have abysmal success rates, whereas private apprenticeships a schools that earn by pairing well trained students with their first job do much better. Once you become a mega corporation, I think accountability and incentive problems start to kick in, just like in many governments. If they also lack the internal scrutiny that you describe within the US government, they will do worse (assuming they don’t have as many differing political objectives as a government). Because there are also examples of huge government funded successes, like the Apollo program, the Golden Gate Bridge, the internet, etc, there is some sort of difference between the government projects that work and the government projects that don’t. I think its important to explicitly determine what that difference is, rather than reduce it to a binary opinion on government projects.