Sometimes large organizations are less efficient than small organizations due to bureaucracy, and sometimes they are more efficient due to economies of scale. I

Sometimes large organizations are less efficient than small organizations due to bureaucracy, and sometimes they are more efficient due to economies of scale. In this case, a large country is more diverse than a small country, but it also has a better access to the necessary expertise. Coming from a small European country, I'm familiar with a failure mode that does not exist in the federal government of the US (but can be seen in smaller states). Sometimes the government performs badly, because it would need expertise that is not available in the market. Everyone who is good at a specific thing already has a job and is not interested in getting a new one. I believe the root issue here is that efficiency is not a fundamental value in the US in the same way it is in many European countries (I'm thinking Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, and the Nordic countries). Meanwhile, decentralization is a fundamental value. Americans on the average do not want the government to be efficient, because it would require a level of centralization they would be uncomfortable with. For example, with centralized reporting, it would be reasonable to expect that 80-90% of people do not have to file taxes in any particular year, because the government already knows every relevant piece of information about them. Another issue is that the US is already far more centralized than the EU. The federal government is a major actor, with an almost 20x bigger share of the GDP than the EU. There is an uneasy balance of power between the federal government and the states, with neither party clearly superior to the other. Nobody has an indisputable authority to change things, which I guess is another reason why American bureaucracy is so inefficient.