I feel like I should try and do business with you because you would be easy to take advantage of..... Workers serve their own interests and are contracted to serve a purpose mandated by government but the only guarantee they do so is the quality of their manager (who has the same problem). Once you get through the matryoshka doll of managerial layers you eventually hit a politician or committee of politicians who also serve their own interests (but more often than not lied to your face about supporting your personal interests in order to get elected). The reason nothing gets pruned in government is because the points in the decision tree that require pruning almost never get hit because there is low interest from a majority of politicians on addressing old problems when they have some new nonsense they are personally invested in that they want to push and they have growth in the economy (and the opportunity to raise taxes if there isn't enough growth) to fund the new nonsense. On top of that, it's harder to prune government workers because they usually have a strong union (because again, no one pruned that nonsense in the 80's and 90's when private enterprise mostly jettisoned theirs due to shareholder and competitive pressures).