Another POV is that if you had to cost out a finished product ahead of time, that’s what it costs.

Startups and small teams fail before they’ve spent $100m on product development. The scenario you describe never happens.

You could argue instead for incremental development, but if they’ve already decided they need this whole stack of products (it’s $100m for a backend, supercomputer code, etc) why delay and make it more expensive?

I don’t know a lot about weather websites. For video game engines, I know Unity has put more than $3b of product development into the engine. That’s a lot of money. And they’re still not “finished.”

Anyway, the worst part of the discourse is the jail time thing. Pray tell, who the hell is going to feel passionate about programming for the government if their peers are threatening jail time over budgets? One of the reasons we get to enjoy high standards of living in the west is that we pay for consultants, like expensive secondary medical staff, programmers, etc, instead of only tangible things. In your world, the only big government expenditures that are permissible are roads and shit. It is the very same energy as tariffs, this belief that the only valid labor is manufacturing. It’s dumb.