Cases of genuine reform and improvement of processes, both in government and the private sector, tend to take the form of upfront investment of resources to overhaul systems, deploy new infrastructure, train staff, etc. which then lead to efficiency savings in the long run.
(Sticking to Eastern Europe, Estonia's "e-government" programme involved significant upfront spending but radically simplified and reduced the costs of large parts of their government, as well as enabling growth of private businesses. Or for US examples look at the roll out of the UPS ORION route optimization system which cost something like $250m to roll out, but now saves $400m in fuel a year).
The problem with DOGE and other similar ideologically motivated attempts to cut government is that they instead cut the funding first, and leave the agencies to work out how to do their job with decreased resources. If you've just fired 10% of the federal workforce the people remaining don't have the slack to consider ways to improve their systems, they are just struggling to keep the current system from collapsing. So you end up with something that costs less, but is providing you with less outputs per dollar of inputs. And doing these things in a messy and rushed way as they have been adds chaos and inefficiency to the system.
It's not just a question of "where would we need reform?" or "what kind of reform would work" but "what kind of goal are we seeking to get out of reform to begin with?"
Most of the time when people talk about "government waste" what they actually mean is "government spending money on things I disapprove of". When right wing lawmakers talk about money wasted on apocryphal transgender mice, they aren't asking about how many transgender mice were generated per dollar, but the existence of the supposed project. Or one of the most frequently cited examples of government 'waste' is overseas aid, which is often very effective at fulfilling its aim, but its not an aim they agree with.
So in practice arguments about government waste tend to be ideological arguments in disguise, which causes people to be distrustful of them.
The issue in Eastern Europe being described seems to more fit the "rule of law" vs "rule by law" phenomeon, often used when describing authoritarian regimes, and particularly China. Where the law exists as a tool for the state to deploy at its discretion, not a consistently applied set of rules that limits them.
Generally the solution to this is not fewer laws, as that also leaves the authorities with great discretion, but to have strong counterbalancing institutions like an independent judiciary, press, opposition parties, etc. that will force them to act within the law.
I think there's also a strong preference towards Wizard over King power (at least in this cultural space) because being seen as actively seeking power over others is considered threatening. Saying you want to tell people what to do because you think you know better than them how to get things done is going to make people defensive and wary.
The main reason I haven't been motivated to do much of the sort of thing you're describing is that it seems to me like there's an oversupply of people trying to do something impressively interesting and novel,
The post inspired a similar thought in me as well. There's a reason that people in any complex field have a wariness of anyone coming in thinking that they've discovered a new way to do everything better from first principles. And modern culture tends to valorize disruptors and innovators more than people who grind away slowly on incremental improvements to complex systems.
Though I do feel like there are a lot of people out there who don't consider knowledge based solutions to their problems as much as they should, so maybe its a reverse all advice you hear situation.
On my model, the strongest individual people around are kings, but adding more kings doesn't typically make civilization stronger
I don't think this is true, at least when generalizing "King" to "manager". One of the major ways societies develop is by getting better at coordination and resource management. Not every manager in e.g. Costco is a king, in the sense of having singular total authority, but they are all making decisions about the allocation of resources that are conveyed to those below them in the heirarchy, that adds together to a complex supply chain network that can achieve material prosperity that farmers alone couldn't manage.
I have a somewhat similar feeling of having become less ambitious and agentic over time. Part of the issue is that a lot of the cool weird stuff I tried when I was younger didn't really work out, so the expected value is low. And my current life status makes me more risk averse.
Or to use your analogy, if the last 10 times the wizard has tried something clever, 9 times the result was some useless green goop, and 1 time a smoking crater where your castle used to be. Then its entirely rational to reallocate funds away from the wizard towards hiring more guys with swords, or castle masons.
So I think the challenge is to make these experiments low risk, and intrinsically enjoyable in some way, so even if they fail you don't lose out. And also be mindful of what domains are best to apply a wizard approach to, and which need the application of mundane forces at scale.
To give a counter example: If one part of my body has been hijacked by a virus and is producing viral cells, I would want all the other parts of my body to fight back against that infection, rather than leave that part alone. Similarly when you talk about conflicts within organizations of societies, you should want people to take sides in a dispute between managers if one of them is embezzling or committing crimes.
So I think your model is beneficial for some forms of conflict but not others. You could perhaps draw a line for action at "things that threaten the viability of the whole setup" But the delineation of that would become its own controversy
The setting for Planecrash is called "Glowlarion" sometimes and is shared with a lot of other glowfics, and makes some systematic changes from the original Paizo canon, mostly in terms of making it more similar to real life history of the same period, more internally coherent and with the gods and metaphysics being more impactful.
There's a brief outline of some of the changes here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZGaV1suMeHrDlsYovZbG4c4tdMVgdq0HzgRX0HUGYkU/edit?tab=t.0
These are the two oldest non-crossover threads I can find: https://www.glowfic.com/posts/3456 by lintamande and apprenticebard (who wrote Korva in planecrash) and https://www.glowfic.com/posts/3538 by lintamande and Alicorn (who wrote Luminosity, the HPMOR style reworking of Twilight).
Incomplete list of other notable threads: https://glowficwiki.noblejury.com/books/dungeons-and-dragons/page/notable-threads
This is tangential to the main point so I don't want to go too deep into it. But since you raise it, that link doesn't show evidence of the original claim Trump made in the State of the Union, which I as referencing. Which was specifically: “Eight million dollars — for making mice transgender. This is real.” (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/transcript-president-donald-trumps-2025-state-of-the-union-address)
The link shows roughly $8 million spread across a number of NIH-funded projects that involved administering hormones to mice to investigate specific medical outcomes. These include topics relevant to transgender patients (e.g., immune responses under hormone therapy https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10849830), but also other populations with atypical hormone profiles. The largest grant ($3.1m) https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526#description is about asthma disparities that occur between cisgender men and women, with trans women mentioned in the context of distinguishing hormonal and chromosomal factors.
This is importantly different, because Trump’s original claim relies on the absurdity heuristic to make the research sound worthless (since mice do not have gender identities). It's simply false to say the aim of the experiments was “making mice transgender.” That was not the goal of any of the studies, and the researchers involved would almost certainly say that’s a meaningless concept in the context of lab mice.
This seems symptomatic of a wider pattern in these kinds of arguments about government spending. The original claim is phrased to sound so absurd anyone would agree it's waste. But it reduces to a more specific and controversial claim where there would be a difference in opinion about whether it's valid use of government money. So "waste" = "spending I disagree with" again.