It's expensive in an absolute sense, but that's what happens when you pay people to work on something. Salaries and benefits add up really quickly. By a rough

It's expensive in an absolute sense, but that's what happens when you pay people to work on something. Salaries and benefits add up really quickly. By a rough estimate, a fully loaded developer costs at least $200-250k/year, counting salary, benefits and incidental expenses (ie supplies, offices... etc). So a team of 12 people would cost ~$3M/year and have $1M/year left over for all their other business expenses. The government might end up paying somewhat less per person, but they'd also need additional people to deal with bureaucracy, coordinate with other agencies, deal with state governments and so on, so they likely want more than 12 people running a system like this.