Anyone that has dealt with state or federal accounts at work know how much waste there is. It is pretty sickening to see how tax dollars get spent. I get calls from school districts that have a "bucket of money" with excess in it at the end of there fiscal year and they ask us to come up with ways in which they can spend it. If they don't spend the money this year, their budget will decrease the next year so they come up with "creative" ways to spend the money.
Here is a true story and a small example used to illustrate the larger issue. There was a post office in rural South Dakota that had an overhead interior lighting fixture fail. Since the post office is a federal account, the contractor doing the work needed to be associated with a particular union that was partnered with the federal government. Rather than call a local electrician that could swap out the lighting fixture in a couple of hours, the post office had to wait 2 weeks for a union electrician to fly in from Tennessee, rent a car, drive 3 hours to the rural post office, stay the night in a hotel and perform the work. A simple project that should have taken a couple hours and cost a couple hundred dollars for the local electrician ended up costing tax payers around $7,000.