[rilezg]

>The entire point of getting the private sector is that their incentive should be to do it in the most efficient manner possible

It seems like a common misconception that businesses do anything in 'the most efficient manner possible'. A business's incentive is to do things in 'the most profitable manner possible'. It happens that efficient and profitable have a lot of overlap, and business schools love case studies about eliminating inefficiencies, but in the real world it is often easier to boost profit thru marketing/client relations/lobbying than thru searching for possible inefficiencies.

[rtkwe]

Plus once the contract is signed and you're a few years into the process there's not really any competition to speak of. Sure the govt could scrap the whole thing and go with another competitor, but in some industries there's effectively one option now for a particular thing and for larger projects like jets it's a decades long process to get to start building anything, and there are of course costs and delays associate with that because you have to start the same broken process over again. To top it all off the next contractor doesn't have much of an incentive to do things cheaply either because they're in the same broken system.