“there are at least 100% more govt employees than the workloading can justify.”
Exactly. Regardless of whether bureaucrats are “lazy and shiftless” the key is that they don’t face the performance incentives more common in the private sector. The same is true of those working for non-profit organizations. There’s ample empirical studies that compare performance of for-profit companies to their government counterparts and the former generally are more efficient—i.e., can deliver the same service at a lower cost (even after accounting for the profits made and taxes paid!). That’s because incentives matter. If they didn’t there wouldn’t be dime’s worth of difference between government agencies and for-profit firms.
It is also the case in public education, where, BTW, there is is one non-teaching supervisor for every ten classroom teacher. That is as high a ration as the number of officers to enlisted in the military, even though all teachers are college graduates.