There isn't even a little bit of common sense or honesty in the way the government spends our money and people wonder why some of us are so adamantly opposed to raising taxes.
The fundamental reason why there's such a difference in efficiency between private efforts and government ones is this:
Private companies that are horrible at managing efficiency go out of business. People in private companies who are horrible at managing efficiency lose their jobs.
Government agencies that are horrible at managing efficiency get bigger budgets. Government employees who are horrible at managing efficiency rarely lose their jobs. The GSA scandal is the only one in recent history that has received any kind of real attention; and that's only because the idiots at the GSA made videos the went viral.
If you work for a company like Microsoft or IBM or Bank of America, you work in a bureaucracy at least as dysfunctional and Byzantine as an average US state. The Federal government is a whole other beast unto itself, but there are probably companies as screwy as they are too.
The fact that the private entity purges some folks doesn't make them better.
I assume it's the same outside of oil as well, but I know the most about that sector. Someone elsewhere in this discussion mentions that the NYTimes paywall cost $40m to implement!
And really, there's plenty of common sense and honesty in how governments spend money. Long ago I did a 6-month contract for a state government agency. I came away impressed. They were no more bureaucratic or wasteful than the large companies I've worked for. Like megacorps, many of the employees were clock-punchers who had all initiative beaten out of them. But many were sincere public servants who were getting good stuff done despite the bad incentives.