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.
If you believe that’s the case why aren’t you founding a disruptor to the construction industry with high-skilled, highly-paid labor? Should be easy to eliminate those “opaque costs” and undercut all of your competition, right? Easy money.
Hahaha, the money is going to the folks playing the games with procurement and management. My skill is actually building things. Which is completely uninteresting to all parties involved in that mess. Often actively avoided, actually, as it tends to ruffle feathers.
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.