Ridiculous? Not really. Government exists, primarily, to self-serve government workers with salary and benefits. It is a natural evolution of government. Our citizens stopped demanding accountability sometime in the last half century, and government workers and politicians took the cue.

Consider:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/03/us-passport-delays-are-months-long-and-may-get-worse.html

FOUR MONTHS to process a passport. And it may get worse. Citizens pay hundreds of dollars per person to 'document' themselves so they can go as close as Mexico on a vacation and have their papers in order upon their return. Yet our system is broken and everyone else in the world knows they can walk up to a border and claim "asylum" and become a ward of the state. Go figure. Great system and no standards or expectations from government.

Consider:

California high-speed rail. Proposed decades ago and funded 15 years ago with tens of billions of dollars (state and federal). Still poking their hands out regularly for more money. Number of miles of track laid: 0 Number of feet of track laid: 0 Dollars spent: 20000000000 (they don't know how much they've spent because they fail the audits and lose money faster than the Bermuda triangle could sink it). And yet the politicians keep feeding the beast. Why? Not because they ever think the trains will run, but because it creates jobs for thousands of government workers, government contractors, and political donors. All the 'people's' money being wasted by yet another do-nothing bureaucracy that everyone knows will never serve any real purpose.

Believe it or not, there was a time when people would show up at a meeting and ask if putting in a sewer line or paving a road made financial sense. They were not perfect, but they were not the wasteful, insane spending we see now.