The point was that they're not planning or interfering with production and consumption, merely passing along financing.

But they exist, and take a salary and benefits, do they not?

Yes, there is going to be some overhead in administering most anything, I'm not sure I see the point you are trying to make.

That's exactly the point. Since there is always going to be overhead to administer anything, does it not make sense to have less things to be administered?

If you're making an efficiency argument, then it really depends on the details. You could conceivably have 10 programs that are horribly mismanaged, and 100 that are well-run.

The more programs you have, the more you have to manage the managing of programs, making it less likely that any one program will be well-managed.

Sometimes the virtues of consolidating purposes are outdone by the virtues of redundancy. A single program is a single point of failure.