But if it's completed late and over budget, your company won't get the bid in the future because of your soiled reputation as long as there are enough competitors. Hence the reference to markets.
As the proverbial wisdom goes, "to improve a dairy's profits you'd need the cows to give more milk and eat less food, so feed them less and milk more often".
The larger the amount of taxpayer money that is being spent the more opportunity for a larger more powerful bureaucracy to oversee the spending and more opportunity for profit by the contractor.
The same mutually beneficial waste exists at the contractor to labor unions interface (union drives up cost, more $$ for them, contractor passes on cost, more $$ for them) and at beureaucracy to politician and appointed administrator interface (bigger bureaucracy more resources go to it and more power for the administrating officials).
The only loser in the whole deal is the taxpayer who has to pay more for less.
I was at a "company retreat" back when I was in IT consulting. It was mostly the top salespeople for that year so I, being on the delivery side of things, found myself in a strange world. After some drinking one of the salespeople started talking about a project that went 2 months past the deadline. I asked "...and they just paid for that extra time?"
Everyone got all awkward as I realized that not only did they pay for that, they would continue to pay us to go over deadline. I was the naive one. It's just one of those topics you don't talk about.