Not really familiar with costs at this scale, I'm interested to see HN's take on whether this is considered cheap or expensive compared to other federal project

Not really familiar with costs at this scale, I'm interested to see HN's take on whether this is considered cheap or expensive compared to other federal projects (both contracted and in-house). My naive view is that this was a genuinely useful effort being wasted and an operational cost of $2.4M _looks_ like a steal, but would appreciate better comparison from people more informed than me.