I worked for a private company contracted to provide a portion of a public service and later got employed by the the government agency.

- The contractor had no budget. Our servers were out of date and we were running out of date OSes and software. We were all paid below standard and overworked.

- We had a tiny budget at the agency to buy things at the very end of the year. We ran up to date software and OSes, except for a few large complicated systems that were setup with grant money. We were all paid well below standard. I was no longer on call at all times of the day and night.

Contract awards go to the lowest bidder.

But if the lowest bidder has some kind of penalty to pay if average queueing time goes over 15 minutes or random members of the public rate the service provided below 3/5 stars, then they'll do a much better job.

That doesn't exist because those contracts are awarded to friends of politicians. You don't penalize a friend, do you?

We were contracted because the agency lost lawsuits and had to payout and change policies. The contractor was never successfully sued, but I had to compile lawsuit discovery documents 6 times in 2 years.

Why do you think that? Businesses cut staffing just as much as governments do. They already got your money, why would they care about spending more money on you when they know it's a pain in the ass to switch to another "provider"?

Here in British Columbia, Canada, our equivalent of the DMV is run by a Crown Corporation, ICBC. I've never had a problem with the wait times. (Mind you, they generally require you to pre-reserve a general timeslot to come in; so, like a restaurant, they can just say they're full for a given half-hour and push people to coming in earlier/later. That by itself fixes a lot of the issues around wait times.)

Why don't we want Ayn Rands around here?

Where I live that's exactly what we have. We have a number of privately owned tag agencies that handle most requests which don't require an in-person visit to the DMV (like a new photo id).

This is fast and takes far less time than visiting the DMV. The various DMVs are bloated beasts with too-large budgets, yet they can't seem to staff people at all their windows.

AAA does run some DMVs and the service is considerably better in my experience.

They do this here in Massachusetts, but they aren't full-service. I just bought out my lease, and have to go to a real DMV to process the title.

When you only have to handle the simple stuff, it's much easier to make it a great experience. AAA is basically the EZPass lane for the DMV.

That's not to say that a full-service DMVs shouldn't be significantly better in most cases, though.

How anyone alive today can think that is beyond me. Everytime I call anything these days I get 3 minutes of disclaimers about why I should use their website or app instead and a pre-recorded sob story about being really busy etc etc just to try and break me before I even get into a queue to be connected to someone. 2022 is a dehumanising time to be alive and just get the most basic shit done.