After national defense, you mean.
Not really, but for as bearish as I am on the government in general, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is a bright spot, and they do very good work at forecasting, auditing, and evaluating tax cuts, tax increases, budget cuts, and so forth. The average person can have faith that the CBO does mostly good work because politicians on both sides of the aisle really dislike the department when they tell the truth about their plans.
If you want to attack efficiency, you have a lot of work to deeply change how the government, and in fact many aspects of our public / government works. How they use contractors, the kinds of contracts they're allowed to enter into, the reviews and permitting and public commenting they need to engage in, unions, labor rates, etc. That would be as big a challenge as the above debate.
That isn't fraud or corruption as most folks understand those terms. It is more simply not designing for efficiency. People are more concerned with other factors like fairness transparent process.
I've dealt with both commercial contracts and government contracts.
Commercial contracts are more lucrative with overhead rates that are truly illegal on govt contracts.
For states and cities, see local government websites for reports. Or you can start here:
https://www.truthinaccounting.org/
On the state/city level, all the money is going to former employees for labor performed in previous decades. The scheme is voters today purchase government employee labor for lower cash outlay today hence lower taxes today, then subsequent taxpayers pay higher and higher taxes as the can gets kicked down the road.
The reason this is different from regular old debt is that via questionable accounting methods and actuarial assumptions, the cost of the deferred compensation is presented as absurdly low compared to what it really is. So it does not show up on any official figures anywhere, just greater and greater portions of the government budget go to paying benefits.
This is why contracting out services makes public sector CFOs so happy.
Replace a large % of your civil servant workforce with a company that specializes in that one function, eat potentially higher or inflated OPEX, but no long-term costs regarding pensions. If the requirement for services change, scale down the contract.
Also on a side note, I love how sneaky that NY Times article leaves out the option to cut defense. After all we can NEVER reduce our military industrial complex, only cut everything else to the bone.