That’s BS. Very little of the cost of these projects is labor actually doing the work. Most of it is planning, admin, and opaque costs nowhere near labor costs to subcontractors.
Similar to Beltway bandit type software work.
That isn’t going to change until there is clear motivation by taxpayers/constituents to actually get something done quickly that doesn’t suck, and they can agree on what that is. Which isn’t going to be anytime soon.
In the mean time, plenty of folks happy to sit back and cash paychecks ‘helping’ the various entities.