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We should be using the government to help people and when we do, it often does a good job.
Examples: Roads, libraries, fire departments, schools, safety regulations…
Notice you also left out police. How's our spending working there?
Plenty of other transit projects exist that have made real differences. Personally I'm a fan of the simple improvements: revised bus routes with dedicated bus lanes and improved stop & shelters, added bike lanes, etc. those sorts of projects are relatively cheap investments and while no single one is a silver bullet they add up. On a bigger scale - Caltrain's electrification was a big win. Both kinds of projects are easier than building whole new tracks or digging new tunnels. Extend and improve the existing systems. Most cities have something to start from.
Stockholm Syndrome. Because our government is so paralyzed and ineffective, we can't even dream big anymore.
https://peninsulaforeveryone.org/blog/atherton-spent-145k-to...
All this to say the government can be fast and efficient mostly because we have an almost infinite number of examples in the US of it doing it.
... before the 1970s. Nothing this millennium, or even the last quarter of the 20th century. It's been, at minimum, 50 years since we've cost-effectively built anything at scale.
Fraud might be relatively rare, but we hear about waste constantly and it isn't newsworthy because a high level of waste is expected from a government operation. If it wasn't then there would be good results by putting things under government control, rather than the more realistic outcome of a politically controlled market oscillating erratically between gluts and shortages depending on who won a popularity contest this year.
To be newsworthy political waste generally has to be competitive with wartime levels of destruction. Things like a 2 billion dollars going down the tubes with basically nothing to show for it. Which is similar to the cost/benefit to the US of a day of wild flailing in Iran, US assaults typically run at around a billion dollars per day. If it is less damaging than that then there isn't much point bringing it up because there are bigger fish to fry.
Would you support cutting military spending? It's a lot higher than other countries.
That's because the US also defends the free world.
Besides, not spending enough on the military can get very, very expensive.
The US invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Iraq have sure helped defend the free world. How many trillions went into those combined? Fantastic return per $ of "free world defense".
When I lived in Germany in the 70s, we were driving on the Autobahn one day, and I saw a jet hedgehopping at full blast over the countryside. I asked my dad what was going on, and why didn't the Germans complain about it. (Hedgehopping is how you avoid radar detection.)
He replied that the Germans didn't particularly like it, but they understood the reason for it. We were in Wiesbaden because my dad worked on the US base and their job was to ensure that there wasn't going to be nuclear combat toe to toe with the Russkies.
Later on, we lived near Luke AFB in Arizona, where Luftwaffe pilots were trained. I'd ride my bike out to the flight line and watch those glorious F-104s blast off with their afterburners lit up.