Elon Musk had the opportunity to demonstrate that, and his track record is negative savings once you factor in the lawsuit losses, economic shrinkage, and vast inefficiencies DOGE cost. For that matter, I note that there’s a direct line from the DARPA grand challenges two decades ago and Waymo’s L4 self-driving cars while his purportedly magic touch has Tesla stuck at L2 for over a decade despite frequent claims that they’re about to make some advances. I bet the DARPA people wouldn’t have nerfed the sensors to save ~1% per vehicle.
There are two major drivers for talking about government inefficiency. One is the laws Congress passes, which agencies have to follow: requiring use of private contractors instead of hiring staff significantly increases costs and lowers efficiency, for example, and things like the Senate Launch System only make sense when viewed from the perspective of maximizing jobs in home states. The other is that a lot of the inefficiency is really differences in service: when people look at how much the post office, VA, SSA, etc. spend one of the things which is easy to forget is that they can’t reject people who are harder to serve so a comparison to companies who can stop serving unprofitable regions or demographics are going to be really misleading.
There are two major drivers for talking about government inefficiency. One is the laws Congress passes, which agencies have to follow: requiring use of private contractors instead of hiring staff significantly increases costs and lowers efficiency, for example, and things like the Senate Launch System only make sense when viewed from the perspective of maximizing jobs in home states. The other is that a lot of the inefficiency is really differences in service: when people look at how much the post office, VA, SSA, etc. spend one of the things which is easy to forget is that they can’t reject people who are harder to serve so a comparison to companies who can stop serving unprofitable regions or demographics are going to be really misleading.