Having worked in the headquarters of 3 federal agencies and in the field for a couple more over a 38 year engineering and management career in federal service, it's highly dependent on which agency you work for and what kind of job you do within that agency.
Some agencies set the standard for how work is performed in certain field (the Corps of Engineers wrote the book on construction management and managed projects that nobody else in the world could have managed (the Manhattan Project, Panama Canal, Cape Canaveral, Al-Can Highway ...)). NASA and the NRC are a couple other agencies are pretty damned professional as well.
I think it comes down to whether the agency has a clearly defined, narrow and understood mission or if it's a big catch-all conglomeration of all sorts of disparate shit (DHS, DOE) and whether it's directly involved in doing stuff or just regulating it.
In any event, inefficiency grows with the size of an enterprise and government dwarfs all other enterprises in size. In some ways, it's the cost of doing business. And if you think our government is fucked up and overly bureaucratic (it is), spend some time in Italy.
