That's fair - but I suspect the same bureaucracy exists in Lockheed et al, as do the incentives to please senators / government that feed the next round of spending.
The simple answer is to prevent small numbers of people having outsize influence on massive spending. So for example, billionaires...
This is a thing I have been noodling on for ages but have no answers other than "you need a clear mission and people at the top focused on that mission even if they are not clear their retirement packages are secure"
(or maybe their retirement packages were secure some way in ...)