Another short list:
Regulating the business cycle, the Interstate Highway System, FDIC/SLIC, Social Security, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act, the GI Bill, clean air and water, scientific research, public health, vast amounts of public information, the Library of Congress (largest collection of printed material in the history of Earth), anti-discrimination policies, investor protections, the military, the courts, air traffic control, airline safety regulation and investigation (including as a worldwide standard and often agent), GPS and weather satellites, the West, fire protection, farm information and training, student aid and support, food and drug safety, containerised shipping (who do you think created the unified-standard demand finally fixing shipping container dimensions?) Municipal freshwater systems, waste removal, sewerage, electric and gas utilities, rural electric and telephone service, railroads, highway systems, post offices, standards of weights and measures (Herbert Hoover (R)), police departments (and here I particularly recommend looking up the Peelian Principles of London's Metropolitan Police), public health systems, social welfare systems, port and harbour districts, national defence, air traffic control, the Internet, Silicon Valley, GPS, satellite weather systems, major oil and gas pipeline systems, stockpiles of critical strategic minerals (to prevent market-gaming by private individuals), the Texas Railroad Commission (which of course regulated global oil prices from 1930 - 1973 -- fascinating story), and a great deal more.
https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105504124162132201
V]ociferous attacks on successful government programs like Social Security reveal one of the dirty little secrets of anti-government conservatives and libertarians: they hate successful government programs even more than unsuccessful ones. Government programs that work contradict the conservatives' contention that government is bad and always screws things up. Worse, successful programs may actually encourage people to view the government and their taxes in a more positive light. So it is the very success of a program like Social Security that invites attack by conservatives. As Paul Krugman has explained, government haters "are not sincerely concerned about the possibility that the system will someday fail; they're disturbed by the system's historic successes. For Social Security is a government program that works, a demonstration that a modest amount of taxing and spending can make people's lives better and more secure. And that's why the right wants to destroy it."
https://governmentisgood.com/articles.php@aid=7&print=1
Citing Paul Krugman, “Inventing a Crisis” New York Times, December 7, 2004, p. A31.
Ezra Klein also recently addressed criticisms of government inefficiency in an interview of Tyler Cowan:
[O]ne thing I know from covering the government is it part of the reason things are bureaucratic and slow moving and you have to file everything in triplicate and things get checked over and over again and it’s way too cautious, is that there has been for decades and decades an organized effort on the part of libertarian and right- wing institutions to embarrass the government if it funds anything that can be made to look silly or that ends up failing, like Solyndra, that ends up seeming to people like a waste of money.
[I]t seems to me that if you want this faster, more agile, more risk- taking government, you also have to somehow quiet these players looking to point out every failure, because being too afraid of failure makes you too afraid of quick processes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/10/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...
It's interesting when the interviewer has the more insightful lines than the guest, though I don't hold that agaisnt Klein.
But yes: government exists in an adversarial space, and has to both engineer itself against and work in the face of that adversity. Unsurprisingly, efficiency can suffer. Though in many, many cases, government does prove highly efficient.