I've got a favorite hobby horse which is an example of this dynamic: The competing administrative bureaucracies in the health care administration, and health insurance, industries.

Both of these classes of (so I claim) drones think they're doing good work: health care drones are trying to navigate the regulations and get care for their patients. Insurance drones are trying to navigate regulations and keep costs down.

But if you zoom out a bit, so your domain of analysis is "The Health Care System", you find that these so-called competing bureaucracies are a large organ whose function is to make it difficult to accurately assign costs to services. As long as those prices are hard to know, they are impossible to optimize, and so the prices stay exorbitant.