To be clear, that’s not what I’m saying at all. Plenty of other governments manage to do this fine; the US government, on the other hand, has been shaped by 40

To be clear, that’s not what I’m saying at all. Plenty of other governments manage to do this fine; the US government, on the other hand, has been shaped by 40 years of anti-government, pro-business philosophy to both favor the largest institutional partners it can find (very often rewarding size and prior government contracts over any actual competency) and to effectively lack the staff and ability to provide proper oversight. We regularly hand over government functions to partners with no actual incentive to provide more than their bare contractually obligated service while extracting the absolute most from users of those services and wind up getting shitty outcomes and high prices, and somehow this is used to _further_ drive the narrative that government is the problem and we should outsource even more.