I am fairly confident that Europe has a lot more red tape than Wyoming. Yet it's considerably cheaper to build large projects in Europe.
In general that's true, but perhaps not when it comes to construction, especially for large public projects. In Europe, the goal of such projects appears to be to complete the project and have the thing that they're building. In the US, at least as of late, it seems like the goal is to pay various interest groups in money or patronage, and whether the thing gets built or not is only of a secondary significance.
I have a theory that in-house expertise is cheaper in the long run.