The other thing I wonder about is why we abandoned the old Caltrans/Public Works model, where the engineering was done in-house for most work? Contracting it out was rarely done, and if done was for limited pieces of work with clear management criteria. Yes, administration and the like were ESTIMATED during project planning using percentages of the project delivery cost, but contracts were usually fixed price. When and why did it change (yes, there's always graft and corruption as a simple one-line shitpost, but really, what changed and why?). A personal observation is that the projects I worked on over the years really started getting expensive once consultants become the project managers - hiring a consultant to manage a consultant was always frowned upon, until it became common around 2000. Not sure what changed, since by then I was out of the direct project delivery cycle (dealing more with interagency and regulatory issues).