That's the number of hours it took to do all of the paperwork necessary for the acquisition, times the hourly rates charged to the government (as a general rule

That's the number of hours it took to do all of the paperwork necessary for the acquisition, times the hourly rates charged to the government (as a general rule for USG cost-plus contracts, 1.5x the developer salary to cover benefits, contractor overhead, etc.) by the people doing the paperwork. The one I remember best from when I was working gov't contractors was that there were forms that certified we were currently complying with all current US trade embargoes and sanctions regimes. So we had to investigate and make sure that we were complying with them all- the State department has a searchable list of all the people and companies that are under various levels of sanctions. But that paperwork, times all of the other forms we had to fill out, times a competitive bidding process (with possibility for appeals) to make sure the government wasn't getting ripped off, etc. This can happen in the private industry as well: I remember once seeing a whole bunch of level 2 managers in a conference room battling it out over exactly which laptop to buy for ~15 developers who needed special extra beefy hardware for a project, and commenting to my L1 manager that the price difference between the two laptops was less than the cost to the company of that meeting, so it would have been wiser to just buy the more expensive laptops and forget the argument.