I would claim this is not a good example at all.
A lot of the specific requirements of public jobs, all the documentation and endless rules, comes from the public reacting very negatively to any reports of waste, perceived misspending., etc. So now everybody is covering their asses by being overly bureaucratic, doing exactly what's written, following the many many rules to the letter. Just like many especially lower-level jobs in large corporations, you just follow the book and please don't show any initiative.
If the public had nothing to say, you really think the bureaucracy would have developed with all those restrictions and checks and counter-checks and rules? I don't think so. That has to come from pressure from somewhere, and when you follow news, every time there is a news report about something going wrong in government, politicians do get pressure.
All the rules don't make the problem go away of course, but everybody in the chain can point to the rules and say "I followed them to the letter!" and be fine.
Example, rules like the ones in the EU that even local projects have to be announced in the whole of the EU and accept bids from everywhere, combined with lots of documentation rules and rules for selecting the winning bids.
Sure, there's more or less subtle ways around those rules (just like in large corporations), but the point is that they exist.
I would claim a lot of the idiosyncrasies of government bureaucracy exists exactly because of the public.
>> all the documentation and endless rules, comes from the public reacting very negatively to any reports of waste, perceived misspending
this is exactly what i mean by having different entities judging the quality of the work, and the one doing the punishing.
If it was the same person, bad quality work gets judged, then immediately punished. The reason why rules/documentation/red-tape exists _is_ because the judging and punishing is delegated away.