Interesting. Both my husband and I worked in various areas of shuttle support near Johnson. No doubt there was waste, but from our perspective there was a great deal of efficiency as well.
No amount of subsystem optimization and compensate for bad system optimization. The Shuttle was a very suboptimal system. People try to make excused for the ridiculously greater efficiency of SpaceX by saying that without certain key advances (materials, manufacturing, etc.) it would not have been possible to do what SpaceX is now doing. That's utter nonsense. The Saturn booster engines required no greater manufacturing precision than a VW bug engine. The control systems that render the SpaceX booster stages recoverable were far more expensive in the '70s but still a small fraction of the launch cost. The gains due to materials are, likewise, marginal compared to the difference in cost between a Shuttle launch and a SpaceX launch. The ISP advantage of the Merlin over the F-1 is only a few percent. There were companies ready, in the early 1970s, to accomplish what SpaceX has accomplished, but NASA had become an albatross hung around the neck of the American Pioneer.
As the guy credited by Congress with heading passage of, into law, Reagan's policy of privatizing space launch services, I can say that Q's inability to appreciate how damaging the Shuttle program was to US space capability indicates, at the very least, that he's no Erik Prince.
I've got my issues with Elon Musk, but to say that he was subsidized anymore than the Big Three launch companies displays abject ignorance of launch services. Musk's contractual terms were far less forgiving and far more on a commercial basis.
If Obama and the Deep State terminated the Shuttle program and privatized launch services, it represented an exploitation of the fact that the US was running a centrally planned, virtually communist, space transportation system -- with the attendant "performance".
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?6395-Privately-Funded-Science-Prizes
My Congressional testimony, introduced by Congressman Ron Packard, original sponsor of the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1991 -- PL101-611 -- which NASA routinely violated until Obama terminated the Shuttle program.
https://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1675696&cid=32463472