This is a very interesting topic that should open eyes on some level how the government systems work.
Being a government official (well sort of) on the technical side, MP-Ryan's comment on the first page is dead on. However, there's something I'd like to add: the bureaucracy has weird rules, some of these rules (I'd love to say most of them) are typically very much out of date, but you'll still have to obey them. The legalization is very slow to change in these parts.
What it comes to government officials spending on trips, the critique is occasionally right, occasionally it is dead wrong. I do recall one MP of ours causing a public outcry due to him buying a bottle of wine on the government's credit card in a restaurant evening. That's the dead wrong part - doing that isn't forbidden by any law and the cost was very minor (compared to stuff even I have done). However, I do recall also our former president flying to Africa and filling a travel claim worth of millions of euros (she had a private jet), which on the other hand, I think, was unjustified and should have caused some consequences but was shushed in the media. I can't comment Obama's 100 M$ claim, but if you are the president of US, you certainly are not traveling alone and those salaries and the security has to be organized somehow.
Rest assured, we are frustrated by the government bureaucracy since it really does hinder doing stuff - and it does that on a DAILY basis. From what I have heard in the 1980s, it was so bad that there was a shadow procurement organization in our working place since the official channel could really not get anything done in time (technical side is much more time critical than other parts of the governments). Currently, I'm mostly annoyed by the competition laws that require us to make a public competition race of certain things when they exceed a certain amount of money. Well, I can sort of understand that, but the problem is, we (on the technical side) are usually much better informed of the current technological status of things than the guys running the offer competition who are looking for the price.
So what usually happens is that we also have to review the offers, work for three months to see that all participants have understood correctly what we want, and then evaluate the results, usually to find out that the company we recommended first was selected, but with additional cost of our three month salary that tends to negate all the advantages of the offer competition. Luckily there are ways to bypass this, but not always - and working here makes you very good at writing documents that explain why the official way was bypassed. However, I have always taken care of those documents existing, so that all decisions can still be reviewed. From other government branches, I have heard that occasionally you'll come across with an offer that is much cheaper than the rest, and it is pretty much guaranteed that the guys who left that aren't even planning to do all that they were asked to do.
And what it comes to private companies being more efficient, I partially disagree. All my colleagues who have left to private side say that their jobs became EASIER, and they get paid more - I'm not saying that this happens on all government branches, but at least on ours. When reviewing the labor hours of private companies to ours, we usually find our hours are about half of what private companies spent. Unfortunately, we also have to support quite a bit of research infrastructure, so that the hour advantage does not transfer to us being cheaper. But on hourly basis, we actually are much more efficient.
