Sadly, no, they are not more easily exposed. Most are quietly swept under the carpet and no-one (other than those working on it) ever know it what a crazy mess it was. It gets classed as something else, is re-tagged as a proof of concept (so was never supposed to deliver anything other than improve understanding of an issue) etc.

The ones you hear about are the ones the government ministers foolishly chose to boast about in some answer in parliament or announce in some TV interview. Normally that's when consultants pounce on it and offer to help make it succeed [i.e. vampire all the money away in insane fees]. A minister announcing it is practically the death-knell of a project.

The ones which succeed generally keep publicity and announcements to an absolute minimum and keep tight control. That's way more difficult than you imagine on a government project as civil servants go hunting for projects to buddy up to in order to pad their promotion cv. If your project budget is more than the last one they screwed, they're all over it so they can boast about the incremental increase in projects they contributed to - a major promotion point (as no-one checks if the project succeeded, the promotion is hinged on how much public money it pissed away).

I was ecstatic to leave UK Gov projects behind.