> government projects of hardware like this usually have all sorts of cost inflation due to the fact they use companies/contractors that have made it their busi

> government projects of hardware like this usually have all sorts of cost inflation due to the fact they use companies/contractors that have made it their business to extract every last cent out of taxpayers Clearly you are not familiar with the government contractor world. It's actually the opposite. Government contracts are regularly audited and contractor's profit margins are tightly capped. The major money leakage is when the government buys products from companies where the majority of revenues are not from government contracting. Those companies don't have to follow the same laws about profit margins.