In my experience, you’ll typically find the most inefficiency when private companies have been contracted to do this kind of work. Theoretically, they should be

In my experience, you’ll typically find the most inefficiency when private companies have been contracted to do this kind of work. Theoretically, they should be incentivized to be more efficient, otherwise they might lose their contract. However, because the contracting process offers so many opportunities for people to trade favors, in reality once a company has the contract they’re effectively locked in. At that point, their incentive is to do the bare minimum possible to keep their own costs down and their profits high.