Those committees, reviews, and approval chains are just distributed responsibility mechanisms to remove the responsibility to think critically about the entire expenditure, which is Friedman's point.

10 people thinking about narrow, nonoverlapping aspects of a large thing will never be as effective as less people considering all aspects of that large thing.

Your alternative has been tried and fails when you have to replace that all-considering function with another at the end of its life and the other one isn’t so good. It’s a less robust system.

Bureaucracy isn’t inherently bad, it’s just like, a model of designing complex systems.

Edit: in fact downthread we have someone literally arguing that it would be good to cut the IRS budget despite every $1 cut costing $7 in tax evasion.

Don't misunderstand me. This isn't an argument against government; it's an argument against this budgeting model. There has to be a way they to structure private sector budgeting efficiency into public organizations.

Those committees are very expensive, tho'. Every one of them is an example of a bureaucrat spending money on his or her colleagues, and in return they will be appointed to committees and boards and fact-finding junkets and all the rest.