Former defense contractor here: This has similar econ dynamics to defense contracts. The market competition between companies is entirely limited to competing

Former defense contractor here: This has similar econ dynamics to defense contracts. The market competition between companies is entirely limited to competing for the exclusive, government granted monopoly of winning the contract. This is known as rent seeking in economics terms. Once rent seekers win, the expectation is that the agency who governs the contract actually does their job and prevents price gouging. This can sometimes be done well, but usually, it isn't. My experience is that most govt regulators are complacent, mediocre, low energy desk jockies who default to doing as little as possible. This structure of management is why the US DoDs JSF (aka f35) program is such an absurdly horrific example of massive cost overruns and under performance. I have an econ background, and one did an internal presentation at Booz Allen about the pitfalls of BAHs rent seeking dynamics encouraging top engineers to get sucked out of real projects (causing them to under perform) to instead work full time on writing proposals in response to govt RFPs. After all that's how you get promoted at these companies because what they say they value isn't actually what they value.