[BluSyn]

Did these digital modernization efforts result in lower agency head count, or did they instead use it as excuse to ask for higher budgets?

[craftsman]

Much better user experience--and in these examples the users could be high school students or teachers, college students, grad students, PIs, public policymakers, etc--users can do complex searching, filtering, previewing data images & plots, and selecting data over a wide variety of spatial and temporal bounds. They can also either directly download the data in a self-describing format (with metadata), or they can describe various kinds of post-processing that is done efficiently and quickly.

[lores]

You're moving the goalposts to leave your internal narrative unchanged. Look, I've worked for huge corps and for the government. There's no particular difference in efficiency between the two; efficiency goes down with scale and legacy rather than with public/privateness. The only non-ideological choices that matter are how much you de/centralise decisions and recording (trading decision efficiency for implementation efficiency) and whether you make those decisions and records at all (moot, someone will anyway, that's valuable data).