Don't think of "government" as one entity. It's helpful to think of "government" and "politicians" (yes yes, branches of gov, but go with it.) Politicians have no incentive to be fiscally responsible; government does.
This kind of "double think" is by this point classical. I can't begin to count the amount of people I've met who are absolutely sure that the majority of their countrymen are too irresponsible to rule their own life, by virtue of them being mere humans, and that politicians are a bunch of crooks. Then they turn around and say the "government" and "authorities" should rule people's life. Clearly the politicians have no influence on the holy "government" and the "authorities" are of course not manned by those mere humans?
I have seldom seen government incentivized to be fiscally responsible. It comes in extremely unnatural shocks. With one hand you're doing flashy multimillion dollar upgrades to the shiny new training simulator/science lab/whatever; with the other you're telling everyone to stop printing so many pages of materials for students.
