Hi. Former Beltway bandit here:

Projects really are managed so that they'll take way longer to finish and cost way more to complete. A project that is over and done after a single year is just that: Over and done. The contracting company now has to scramble to find new projects to bid on and hopefully win. But a project that takes multiple years and has to be re-upped yearly before the rebid process has to happen? That's a contracting company that has a steady revenue stream for the next few years.

In the meetings where the proposals and bids were put together for the project, we always, ALWAYS structured the project around waterfall software development, Java, and Windows servers. Because waterfall is slow, Java takes a long time to debug, and Windows requires a great deal of time and money to use as an application platform. That was five or six years for the first go-round, easily. Nevermind the fact that the same project could be put together with Python, Postgres, and Bootstrap in a month (allowing for legal sign-off on using those things (if that wasn't an issue, two weeks, tops)).

Which, for those of us who are grunts in the cubicle gulags, means we have health insurance for another couple of years. And management can take their month-long vacations without telling anybody until after they're in Tahiti.

It's just fuel for the "hur hur EU project wasteful" fire (saw several comments to that effect elsewhere)