Some inefficiency is valuable.

Like slack in an organization, allowing it to absorb surprises without capsizing.

Other inefficiency is just noise, waste.

But critically, you can't know which is which, because it's contextual!

Maybe the context changes in a way it hasn't in the past and suddenly something that was previously noise is now the life-saving adaptation.

In an environment with power-law distributions, you can't simply say "this would have worked in the last 100 years of variance we saw" because you could very well get a wildly-out-of-distribution event.

The government is well suited to be inefficient in ways that are load bearing in ways no "efficient" actor would be.

Who else would stockpile millions and millions of masks just in case a pandemic broke out?