This is not the real reason imho. We use Consultants on all large projects worldwide and even the Contractors can be paid Consultant wages. The reason that repo

This is not the real reason imho. We use Consultants on all large projects worldwide and even the Contractors can be paid Consultant wages. The reason that reports can't put their finger on it is that the reasons are as complex as the project and in projects of this size, there are so many differences between different ones that is very hard to draw conclusions. Must more obvious problems: 1) All non-agile projects are subject to expensive changes (even if those changes are needed/legit) 2) Almost all large projects are subject to mountains of bureaucracy (arguably some is needed), which wastes time and causes investment to be lost 3) The up-front estimate is usually at least 1 order of magnitude wrong because it is expensive to do things like soil studies, geology surveys etc. One sinkhole in the wrong place, $10M please! 4) Organisations don't scale efficiently. There is some economy of scale to a point, after which a lot of flab, whether it's specialist jobs that are paid full time for 20 hours per week or just how easy it is to slack off the job and not get noticed. The US, it seems, has some sort of unique challenges, firstly with the strength of labor unions but also their more complicated government structure just adds more people to give opinions, to obstruct, to have to sign-off finance. Good luck everyone.