All long lived bureaucracies are fundamentally self serving. They must be, otherwise they would not survive. The principles of evolution apply equally to organizations as living things.
Equally, bureaucracies are fundamentally inefficient. A one person company is highly efficient. There is no overheads due to internal misunderstandings, meetings, and communication.
As soon as more people are added there are overheads in these areas. As a rough guide, the amount of overhead is probably proportional to the number of layers of management. A small company where there is one boss and several workers is a two tiered system, and has a relatively small overhead.
A large organization with, say, eight tiers of management and suffers a major overhead - both in meeting and communication costs, but also in misunderstandings and corporate game playing.
Governments tend to be the largest organizations of all, and probably have about 15 levels by the time decisions go back to the shareholders - the voters. This makes them incredibly inefficient, and is a good reason for small government.
In practice, many large organizations are more efficient than smaller ones because of economies of scale - in the real world a trade-off exists between these.
See