RE: Don't let the government try to "lower the price" on anything
Government inefficiency comes from two places: organizational entropy and patronage.
Organizational entropy is something you can observe in the private sector. As someone who works for a small company, and therefore has multiple jobs, it's obvious when we deal with larger companies where everyone has one job, especially shipyards (they are probably one of the least efficient businesses). A small company like ours can turn on a dime because it isn't compartmentalized and doesn't have a rigid hierarchy. The sales, order processing, order filling, and shipment is done by the same people. In larger companies these are broken up into departments. There are separate people for sales, purchasing (called purchasing agents), order fulfilment (e.g. warehouse workers and stockroom workers), and shipping and receiving along with multiple layers of management. These increased complexities not only create much more lag time between review, approval and execution but also means there are more chances for communication between people and departments to break down and lead to more errors and deadweight.
Patronage is also something that occurs in the private sector but it's mediated by competition and the necessity of reducing costs or quality of service to stay relevant. Of course, no such incentive exists for monopolies. When everyone's objective is to bring home as much pork as possible for their constituents and special interest groups you will inevitably get convoluted bills and inflated costs that far exceed the original design.
another wonderful response from you. I always learn a thing or two when you chime in buddy. Thanks for that.
I can totally identify with what your are saying about organizational entropy and have witnessed it first-hand anytime I deal with government contracts. It seems as though it is almost always "someone else's job" whenever we talk to anyone. Even the government project managers I have met on larger worksites seem to not really have a clue about anything that is going on, let alone be capable of actually doing the work themselves if it came down to it. There is probably some regulation that makes it illegal for them to do so.
In my business, almost everyone on our sites is capable of doing the job of almost anyone else on that site as well and if we run into a hitch in our planning, we can move resources to another part of the job so that it doesn't get log-jammed. Of course my crew is less than 50 people but I don't see why this couldn't be applied to larger organizations as well.