This is just bad government, not government.

Public spending on things that require (a) maintainance (as almost all things do) (b) are massively less functional if the investment is not sustained (as many things are) is inherently going to lead to suboptimal results. It's equally bad if private entities do this, but for one reason or another, people seem to bitch about this less, because, well "freedom" etc.

Public spending (private too!) is also bad if it creates unnecessary bureaucracies and unnecessary obstacles. This can be tricky because defining "unnecessary" requires a set of values and these may not be universally accepted.

So, if you have a government program that behaves as in your hypothetical example, then the problem is inefficiency, corruption and waste, not government.

It seems reasonable, though, to observe that some areas of government spending seem to largely get funnelled into contracts with the private sector where a great deal of money is spent, yet the actual problem is seemingly never fixed. An example of this is L.A.'s "homeless industry"; billions of dollars are spent, yet the problem gets worse and worse. Eventually, one considers that the purpose of the system is what it does - create cushy jobs for those administering the private-sector agencies that receive the lion's share of this government spending, away from any public accountability.

We still don't have a working model of a government doing a good job in the real world when it comes to carte blanch giving groups money. It does work really well when it's on the private side. The crux of the issue is that I pay too much in Taxes for 30% of it to be spent on downright fraud. Whether that is daycare scams, military spending scams, hospice scams, etc...

Since about 30% of my lifetime pay goes to taxes, and I am estimated over my entire life to make about $7m in salary. $1M of that is taxed, so potentially 300k of money is going to SCAMS.

Think about it, what if the government just decided tomorrow to give back all this money. I could finally afford to buy a house! But instead of me being able to buy a house, let's put another million bucks in a suitcase to fly to Mogadishu.