There are thousands of governments in the US (and many more globally). Towns, cities, counties and states and of course the federal government. Many of these governments are accountable and effective in a way that charities aren't.
The conclusion I’ve reached is that, if you have a low time preference, investing in high-risk R&D is the highest social return strategy.
My conclusion is usually that governments are good _coercion_ mechanisms for dealing with situations where the actions of individual players cannot lead to a good outcome for all unless they are somehow forced to go against their self-interest (i.e. collective action problems), but that as _execution_ mechanisms it is a pretty clear point that they are tremendously wasteful.
While there is a coercion aspect to it (people can't burn trash in their yards), there is also an execution aspect to it (roads are paved, electric lines are maintained).
Some governments are better than others and many are truly evil.
Grantors like Scott could give to the best governments and reward them for their effectiveness and accountability. This is similar to how she gives to high quality charities but not low quality ones. She could do the same with government recipients.
Let me explain my situation, which I believe provides a significant counterpoint.
I live in a third-world country where government is constantly pushed into supporting more and more benefits, high salaries and job safety for an educated public servant class which has the connections and resources needed to pressure the government successfully.
Meanwhile the general populace - who lack the qualifications for the highest-paying government jobs and can only ever qualify for the lowest-tier ones (which are not good, but still better than going into the private sector - more on this going forward) - is constantly impoverished by the inflationary pressure created by the government's need to finance spending on the high-tier public servants.
The private sector is also extremely bad, as the government constantly passes anti-business laws in the name of fighting "neoliberalism". Of course, this does not at all hinder multinational corporations - supposedly the face of "neoliberalism" - as these can pay for the armies of lawyers needed to navigate the constantly-changing legal environment, and the ludicrous worker obligations created in the name of "protecting the working class".
Meanwhile, smaller businesses - mostly owned by the dwindling lower-middle class, as middle- and upper-middle class people either leave the country to find skilled work elsewhere, go into the high-paying government jobs or work for the multinational corps - die constantly, as they cannot deal with the legal insecurity and fees created by this environment.
Most poorer people actually do not have any legal worker's protections even though our law is EXTREMELY generous to workers on paper, because only mega-corps can afford to hire people within the law - most people work outside of legal parameters just to survive.
So you end up with an environment where most workers have immensely generous rights on paper, government is extremely powerful and constantly passes measures which are justified as protecting the country from "neoliberalism", which we are told is coming to make us enslaved to foreigners and impoverish us all from our "birthright".
Said "birthright" consists of very bloated public services which generally suck for most of the population and serve mostly to produce sinecures for rich, well-educated people. The private sector consists mostly of foreign mega-corps who are, paradoxically protected from competition by laws passed in order to prevent "neoliberalism" from ravaging the country.
The country is, as you can imagine, corrupt to its core and runs on shady deals between the people in power, the people running mega-corporations and the high-level public servants (these groups have significant overlap, as one might imagine).
Sorry for rambling on, but whenever I see people - ostensibly from the first world - talk about the evils of "neoliberalism", I wish they would look more at how trying to prevent the supposed evil of "neoliberalism" has ravaged the third world and raised oligarchies to power.
Not only is there no such evidence, but the Scandinavian countries that people like to point towards as proof that "democratic socialism" can bring good or even outstanding governance, are actually extremely neoliberal in basically everything save their highly tailored support for lower incomes. "Socialism with Scandinavian characteristics" is just good old bleeding-heart neoliberalism.
(For clarity, actual neoliberalism without the bleeding-heart part would be something like Singapore - still very good governance in many respects, but the social inequality there is quite tangible and quite a few people suffer real hardship as a result.)