The inefficiency is primarily due to the scale and customization of the projects, not that it's government per se. In any project of sufficient scale, 1) you ve

The inefficiency is primarily due to the scale and customization of the projects, not that it's government per se. In any project of sufficient scale, 1) you very likely use contractors at some level 2) you will have to invest into some sort of oversight infrastructure 3) with that much money invested, you want a strongly guaranteed outcome, so you'll err on the side of reliability over cost efficiency (or pay for the cost of failure and rework in subsets of the project). I agree though that the mix of in-house expertise vs outside contractor effort does play a big part in the outcome. Look at Boeing's 777 vs 787 aircraft development for different sides of cost to use internal resources, vs leaning more heavily on external resources. The 787 with it's heavy use of subcontractors has had a much more difficult introduction. The government in general has been upping the contractor content in a lot of projects with the belief that more "competitive private contractor" content automatically means better efficiency. But, in truth, it's no silver bullet, often increasing costs if it's blindly applied - especially if you fall below some threshold of in-house expert judgement.