In all large companies I have worked (>10K employees), the level of bureaucracy is similar to the government and decision making is really slow. In my experience, "private is more efficient" is a myth and primarily driven by ideological reasons.
We have worked with two state agencies and learned that entire philosophy is moot in a government agency because they dont care about the value of features and they dont care about saving money.
It was incredibly depressing and so we generally try not to work with government agencies.
Those things are all absolutely a matter of organizational size, almost to the exclusion of everything else (including public/private distinctions).
Some of our most frustrating clients were the massive private sector companies that would kick around a proposal for six months, call meeting after meeting, and deal with an ever-changing cast of stakeholders who needed to sign off on this round.
At least in government there was less flux in who we dealt with over time.
1. Government is orders of magnitude larger than the biggest companies, and, whats' worse, the inefficiencies scale (my guess) exponentially and not linearly.
2. Government assumes democratic oversight, which is way more costly and time intensive to implement than the rule of the iron fist of the shareholders via board of a company.
3. A lot of the ways the government functions is passed as laws. If a private business needs to do a major change of strategy, say was the case with Tesla recently where they decided to get rid of the dealerships, they can implement it very quickly - whereas in government, an operational decision of this magnitude (say the IRS deciding to close local branches), would probably require changing many laws - which involves political bargaining and just general queue to get the new law passed in the parliament. BTW this is true even for much smaller stuff, like the template of the forms for tax returns - they cannot be changed willy-nilly, but need a new law to be passed (usually at a lower level than parliament, but still). Imagine facebook needing to go through some internal legislation process every time they change a form on their website - so much for "move fast and break things".
City and county-level governments are hugely varied in size, but it doesn't take much for a private company to be larger than vast swaths of them.
Of course, you're right that no private business is as big as the US federal government.
2) A lot of companies do have elaborate internal processes for getting anything done; the shareholders don't really do much for the day-to-day operation of a company, seldom where it comes to purchasing decisions.
3) It's really more regulations, which have to be changed in concert with laws, than laws themselves. Especially at the local level, governments have pretty wide leeway so long as they do things under a general framework of fairness and competitiveness (again, varies based on corruption at work....but private companies are corrupt, too; we just don't get to peek under the covers nearly as often.)
Outside pressure was the key determinant of waste and bureaucracy. Companies without competition (e.g. banks) had almost zero competitive pressure but most government departments always had at least a bit of democratic pressure.
The best run were companies under heavy competitive pressure or government departments that were transparent and closely watched.
S.R. Hadden: "First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?"
But I've also been really impressed with government work recently. The people at the post office on tax day were much nicer and more helpful than 80% of customer support I get from companies.
Who are you quoting there? Nobody in this thread. Nobody here was claiming private was more efficient - you've imagined that.
We were saying it was less beaurcpatic and a more pleasant working environment in the private sector.
Look at basic things like expense policies in government jobs. The pettiness of it will astound you. In the private sector I just get given a credit card and treated like an adult.