In a pandemic, government efficiency can make the difference between life and death. You would expect our civil “servants” to rise to the occasion. Some are. But the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog, is sounding the alarm that for the most part, Washington bureaucrats are dithering while Americans die.

In a report released this week, the GAO details dozens of dangerous failings in one government department after another — failings that needlessly put you and your loved ones at risk.

Start with air travel. After the 2015 Ebola threat, the GAO urged the US Department of Transportation to draft a plan for safe air travel during an infectious-disease outbreak. Five years later, the DOT is still squabbling, insisting the job should be done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention instead — travelers be damned.

This week, American Airlines announced it will start running packed flights. Delta, Southwest and JetBlue are promising to keep middle seats open, but only for a few weeks more. As part of the pandemic rescue bill, the airline industry got a $25 billion grant. The DOT should have recommended requiring airlines keep middle seats open in return for the money. The public got zip. No art of the deal in that arrangement.

One of the GAO’s most serious concerns is the absence of a specific vaccine-distribution plan. President Trump launched Operation Warp Speed to develop, manufacture and distribute a vaccine for the novel coronavirus. Development and manufacturing are on a warp-speed timetable — or as close as we can get to it in an otherwise slow and daunting process. But the CDC, which acknowledges responsibility for distribution, is dragging its feet.

The public wants specifics. If and when a vaccine is ready, where should they go — to a doctor’s office, a hospital, a drugstore, a testing site? Who will be at the head of the line — the elderly, health workers, first responders, minority communities? These questions should be discussed publicly now, instead of causing delays once the scientists complete their job.

NIH infectious-diseases expert Anthony Fauci has warned that getting enough Americans vaccinated to create herd immunity won’t be easy, because of anti-vax sentiment. An Associated Press poll found that only 49 percent of Americans intend to get vaccinated. “It’s going to be very difficult,” Fauci says, and will require a major educational initiative.

That should be in the works ­today, not tomorrow. Changing public opinion takes time. Advertising before the vaccine is ready may be risky, but the CDC should have ads in the can, with sports figures and media stars advocating vaccines.

No other agency has performed worse than the CDC. It flubbed developing a COVID-19 test, costing weeks at a critical time. It ignored nursing homes until it was too late. And it misled the public about masks. All deadly mistakes.

The GAO reports that even now, four months in, the CDC can’t provide accurate data on who is getting tested. In the private economy, these CDC officials would be fired. It’s disappointing that Trump has put up with this chronic incompetence.

Here’s the icing on the cake. The Internal Revenue Service sent out $1.4 billion in relief checks to people who are dead or in prison. IRS bureaucrats had no intention of trying to recover the funds, until GAO suggested it. A billion dollars down the rat hole doesn’t seem to matter to bureaucrats on the federal gravy train.

When the pandemic struck and the CDC botched testing, Trump marshaled private firms to rush masks, ventilators, tests and other equipment into production. He had no time to reform anything. He bypassed the bureaucracy, saving lives as a result. Now he is doing it with vaccine development. Those are Trump’s healthy instincts as a businessman.

But ultimately, the president is head of a vast federal bureaucracy. He can’t abolish it. He has to manage it — and demand results.

Candidate Donald Trump vowed to raise standards and clear out slackers clogging the bureaucracy. He has taken some steps to do that. But the poor performance of several agencies during the pandemic is proof more heads need to roll, starting at the CDC.

Betsy McCaughey is the chairwoman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and author of the forthcoming book “The Next Pandemic.”