When people complain about government inefficiency, they usually say it as though the inefficiency comes from the fact that it’s government. Bureaucrats, politics, red tape. And sure, those exist. But the more time I’ve spent around very large companies—and more recently, state and federal agencies, and big public universities—the less convinced I am that inefficiency is a uniquely governmental trait.
The real culprit might be size.
A small startup is fast and sharp because the distance between an idea and action is tiny. You don’t need a committee to change the product. You don’t need five levels of approval to spend $500. You just do it. But as the organization grows, new layers appear—finance approvals, legal reviews, risk committees, middle managers—each designed to prevent disaster, but each adding friction. By the time you’re 10,000 or 100,000 employees deep, you’ve basically built a machine optimized for stability, not velocity.
Governments don’t feel slow because they’re governments. They feel slow because they’re operating at the scale of a Fortune 50 company with even higher stakes, more scrutiny, and more stakeholders. In fact, when you look closely, big corporations aren’t much different. Try to get a large multinational to adopt a new piece of software. Try to change a university procurement process. Try to innovate inside a regulated industry. The timelines are eerily similar to what you’d expect in government.
Maybe government inefficiency is less about who they are and more about what they are: very large, very complex organizations with too many dependencies and not enough slack. If that’s true, then our assumption that governments should operate more like businesses may be flawed. Large businesses already operate like governments.
I don’t have a neat conclusion here—only an open thread worth pulling. If we accept that slowness and inefficiency are natural byproducts of size and complexity, then the real question isn’t why government is so inefficient, but whether it’s even possible to build any large organization that isn’t.