Yeah, I remember that, I'm a government contractor, and trust me... yes it could...

I have a few observations after working around government for a few years (at state, local, federal, and education levels).

- Local government is generally the most efficient, but that definitely isn't saying much. They have a lot of incompetence, but at least not many of them.

- Police/Schools are probably the worst of the local govie stuff... they always proclaim being broke, but its mostly because their pension and medical costs are 80% of their non-payroll spending. Again... the first step to a cure is understanding the problem. I also think that govie-lifetime workers are just generally not very bright or dynamic people, so they 'guard' those pensions with their bodies practically. If they had to self-invest and self-manage their retirement, they would die in a $300 / month senior trailer park somewhere.

- Federal employees don't believe they can possibly ever make a mistake... if someone does, its never their fault, the mistake only happened because they were 'understaffed' - so no one loses their job, they just hire more people. If you have 10 people for a job that one person can do, it's unlikely you will make a mistake (that is actually the logic). I have a lot of knowledge of one particular organization with 2300 feds that could really do their job with about 600... and only because a lot of the work is heavy-industrial maintenance in remote aeras and it actually does require a lot of people to do safely. 200 are probably where the rubber meets the road, and at least 400 of the fluff. The rest really just wander around looking for something to do all day and getting paid as a GS12+ to do it (GS15's make around $130k+/- a year... we have a lot of those)...

- The military would probably be efficient if you took the civilian leadership and bureaucracy out of it.

- As sad as it is, the procurement at the government contracting level is usually pretty fair, I work in bid/proposal/presentations/wins... an realistically, I only see graft or corruption in maybe 20% of the business we go after, albeit it is in technology. One glance at something like a state highway department website with contracting postings and everything is over a million dollars.. even a stoplight in BFE... you have to kind of wonder about that stuff though...

- Most of the corruption I have observed is in the federal/state/local (internal) employee hiring process.. most of those panel interviews tend to be a bit of a joke and they always hire the one they wanted before they put out the job posting. If someone scores higher (like a disabled Vet just back from Iraq or something), they may actually close the job posting and put it out again and repeat that until the pool only includes dumb-f*cks plus the one they want. As contractors, its been my observation we tend to always work for the more 'honest' government managers and they like contracting better because they get people to do the work, and can fire them with the wave of a hand instead of a 3 year union-battle that will be pointless in the end. Believe it or not, contracting-out seems to be far cheaper at every try whenever you weigh all the options..

A lot of them want to do the right thing, their hands are usually tied though by legislated regulations that came from politicians that are absolutely corrupt at every level. I really think its beyond any one person or political party to fix though, we probably need to junk all of it and start over.

California actually went to zero-dollar budgeting last year, agencies have to propose and defend every dollar...rarely leads to actual 'cut' of people, but gets harder to expand at least.

The problem isn't so much the 'need' for services, the issue is that every government manager since the beginning of time measures up their own 'x' to other govie managers by how many people they manage... so creating new hires is more about bragging rights than legitimate need .

I could be persuaded that we could return, or even surpass, our great position in the world but I believe that we have been educated into blindness. O may be one of the closers but the heavy lifting has been going on for more than a century. With the instant spread of ideas today, our system could take over the world just by our good example if government stepped out of the way and allowed free-market capitalism full reign. Debt, poverty and divisiveness among groups can be overcome the outcome from the resulting innovation, production and economic growth that would be unleashed. Those in control do not want this because power will shift to people of merit instead of influence.