The stereotypical left-wing position is, "This government program should be left alone, even if it's poorly-run"
The stereotypical Gray Tribe position is, "This government program is poorly-run; let's debug it"
Until the Gray-Triber realizes that there's no real feedback loop between policy effectiveness and actual policy and end up as either a resigned left-winger or bitter right-winger
I guess it all comes down to your definition of "poorly run".
Think it's more like "Lets spend more money to fix it".
It's worth it to pay attention to voices most critical of the biggest, most broken government program.
The rest is quibbling over minutiae.
No, it is "This government program is poorly-run probably because it is severely underfunded."
After all, "government is poorly-run" tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy: it is used to justify spending cuts, which does in fact result in performance problems.
"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." -Grover Norquist, 2001
Oh wait, studies require funding too, so we can't have those.
I mean do you honestly believe that a Republican would propose increasing funding of a non-military, non-security agency if they were shown hard evidence that said agency's problems were in fact caused by lack of money?
Anecdotally, I've worked as a business analyst with many government agencies, and I've found that in most cases they are underfunded, sometimes horrifyingly so.
More likely than not, an honest analysis would see the 80/20 rule show up, dozens of needless and redundant positions will be exposed, and when presented with the data the agency is most likely to scoff at the idea of cutting headcount and spending through efficiency as that means a smaller budget for next year. A fun example of this is Detroit Water and Sewer's egregious spending on asinine positions such as a farrier, despite having no horses.
E.g. Crime in inner-city neighbourhoods. It's 2017, we should be able to put cameras (facial-recognition and license-plate-reading) at every street corner, inside every store, track every single gang-member, and subsequently institute curfews for them that would probably eliminate 90% of crime. But, we don't. We skirt around the issue, we try fix it using "round-about" "ways, means, incentives" and all other manner of things instead of tackling a problem head-on with near-unlimited funding. If it was up to me, I'd ramp up funding to a ridiculous degree, and then start scaling back after the problem is solved. Not the other way around, whereby the program and society as a whole has to beg politicians and the rest of us to fund things properly.
Just skimming google for Gray Tribe stuff and seeing that it's basically another name for 'libertarian tech workers', this isn't their stereotype. The stereotypical libertarian position on government programs, poorly-run or not, is the same as the right-wing position: "let's get rid of it".
To be honest, the OP's description where the favoured group was clearly superior than the dumb-as-rocks alternatives reminded me of a book I once saw. The author had decided that since there were 13 lunar months in a year, there should be 13 zodiac signs. So she invented a new one - the spider. It's defining features were 'magic' and 'mystery' and it was just all-around better than the other signs... and conveniently her birthday happened to fall in the range of this new sign. :)
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
[2] https://paxdickinson.wordpress.com/2014/10/29/three-modern-g...