I have a feeling that over the last 100 years in the West, particularly in the USA, there has been a continuous decline in the efficiency of government.
You could be right or wrong but instead of having this as a felling, why not venture of research to get your feelings satisfied? Perhaps this is a whole decade you are referring to here.
At the end of the 19th century, the United States began to suspect that the growth of monopolies was threatening the political stability of the country, and some oligarchs were forced to break up their economic empires into several smaller parts (the first precedent was the breaking up of Rockefeller's Standard Oil into about 7 companies).
That was was really when the system of an efficient government began to fall apart where politically, there came several political and geographical regions with allocations of authorities taking advantage of them through the revenues and natural resources as allocations between the selfish governing system.