Spot on,anecdotal evidence ahoy but I'm a contractor so I move around a lot in the last few years I've worked for a government department, a mid stage medical startup, a late stage startup, a large corporation, and a very new startup.

The efficient ones have been the smaller companies in everything from decision making to process. The gov department and large corp are Kafkaesque nightmares where getting an account is a 3 page form and a 5 day SLA.

At the medical startup I was given a laptop and asked for a PR by the end of the day, at the large corp I didn't get a laptop for a week and even then I didn't get logins (yes, logins...) to the code repo for another week.

Governments are inefficent because they are made up of lots and lots of people, same as large companies. Everything needs to be triple checked, rubber stamped and have all people in the chain cover their asses because if anything goes wrong it's very important not to be anyone's fault (but it's definitely someone's fault. This isn't a blame free post mortem here!)

A large company once hired me for a 5-week project. I got onsite and made my reqs for laptop and access. They gave me a badge at the end of week 1. I received the laptop in week 3 and the accounts were setup in week 4. Happily, they paid for the entire time.

Even as the very cautious spender I'd imagine I have wasted at least few hundred dollars between me and spouse just since new year. So at large scale even larger wastage does not look inconceivable.