But this is already the case -- nobody believes the price tags put on big government projects, at least in the US.<p>You simply can&#x27;t build something like the Bay Bridge for $250 million. And the reason public works projects are so expensive is usually because they&#x27;re big, things go wrong, and there&#x27;s a political element. You can&#x27;t predict everything that will go wrong, and you&#x27;ll never remove politics from it.<p>The problem isn&#x27;t that huge public works projects cost a lot of money, it&#x27;s that the estimation process is more about politics than reality. People building the Bay Bridge knew they could go find comparable projects and build an estimate that way -- they didn&#x27;t do this because they were trying to come in at a certain price point, which means throwing a defendable methodology out the window.<p>I&#x27;m not saying this is the way it SHOULD be done, but it&#x27;s the way things are done. And if you try to do it differently, someone else will just underbid you and raise the price later.