Included in the rhetoric of the political speeches of the past two weeks have been differing visions of the role and size of government. And to a lesser extent, how to pay for it.

Four years ago, candidate Barack Obama repeatedly promised to go through the federal budget “line-by-line,” scrutinizing federal spending to find the programs that worked and the ones that didn’t. He promised to support the effective programs, make the poorly run programs better, and eliminate programs and spending that were not needed or were wasteful.

But that was then and this is now. Nowhere in last week’s Democratic convention was there talk of making government work better.

An article in last week’s Time magazine titled “Too good for government” told the story of two top administrators who came into federal agencies recently, hoping to make operations more efficient and cost-effective. But the would-be reformers ran up against a change-resistant bureaucracy and were eventually forced out.

It’s a discouraging story because when taxes are debated, more people might support higher taxes if they believed that their tax dollars were being well spent. Stories of waste and inefficiency appear almost weekly.

The Time magazine article told of two high-level administrators who were brought in to shake up the status quo and make government more efficient.

At the weatherization arm of the Energy Department, Claire Broido Johnson was brought in to jump-start a program so ineffective that it managed just 12 weatherization projects in California in 2009 when it was supposed to be weatherizing 2,500 homes a month. The article described Johnson as a skilled business person with a bold, no-nonsense approach to reforming the agency. Her efforts to bring efficiency to government work didn’t go over well with the longtime federal employees who liked things the way they were.

The Time article said Johnson “ruffled feathers.” One career government worker filed a grievance against her after she criticized him for napping on the job.

In Johnson’s case, her reform efforts led an employee or employees to leak emails suggesting that Johnson took shortcuts around federal hiring rules to fast-track filling some critical jobs. She defended her urgent approach to whip the agency into shape, saying, “I need competent bodies now.”

The political fallout forced her out of the job.

Time’s writer said, “For the crime of trying to whip an incompetent bureaucracy into shape without jumping through every required hoop, she was forced to resign.”

The Time article told of another would-be reformer in Washington who met a similar fate.

One of the more telling parts of the story explained that employees in Johnson’s department who fought her efforts at reform called themselves “WeBes.”

The article noted that the government workers knew that they were in their jobs for life, regardless of performance — and the reform-minded administrators were political appointees who come and go.

The WeBe’s — as in “We be here, you be gone” — figured they could keep things as they were. They were right. The reform-minded appointees were forced out, and the status quo remained, as inefficient as ever.

These are just two stories in a massive federal government. No doubt there are some reform efforts that succeed, but the government bureaucracy with its protected-worker mentality most often resists change.

Four years ago, Obama’s promise to go through the federal budget line-by-line in search of inefficiencies and wasteful spending offered hope and change. It would have been encouraging to have heard some kind of positive progress report by now. Instead, it appears that that promise was nothing more than another campaign line.

Americans are desperate for signs of government being careful when spending other people’s money. They want to believe that efficient government is not an oxymoron. It’s unfortunate that Obama’s promise was not fulfilled, or there isn’t even much evidence of a serious attempt.