[addicted]

They are unlikely to be more efficient than VCs but that’s not really relevant when VCs have completely different goals and incentives than what the government may need.

If there was an effective way to enlist VCs while aligning goals then they would opt for it.

Space exploration is a good use case here. The US government has found a way to align its goals with that of the private space industry and is therefore seeing tremendous efficiencies. However, because of a whole bunch of reasons (largely because there was a lot of basic open ended R&D that needed to be done) this alignment was probably not possible in the 60s and NASA was more successful.