[jjk166]

The short time horizons for governments is due to election cycles. Projects that win votes in the next election are prioritized over things that will benefit future administrations. This often leads to wildly inefficient uses of resources, such as projects being regularly cancelled and restarted, and ignorance of maintenance costs.

Running the government "like a business" is meaningless rhetoric and no one can agree on what that actually means, but typically those in favor of the idea want to privatize government services and generally reduce governmental 'bloat' where whatever policies they don't like or utilize are defined to be inefficient. Timescales are typically irrelevant to that discussion.

[kergonath]

Sure, because bloat becomes revenue when it goes from government-run to a company.