I am not saying anyone can make the jump, but promotions often mean handing an order of magnitude larger projects.
Think of all of the politics & hard choices involved, for instance, in displacing people vs. bending over backwards to accommodate them with the California high speed rail project.
Ie, a project twice as complex should be 5x the cost due to the additional management, comms overhead, permutations and potential risk.
Said another way the curve is logarithmic and there's a theoretical upper bound on project complexity.
Also, if a 2x as complex a thing takes 10x the budget then that scaling is already part of the budget figure.
Some people take staff jobs because they are good at the bureaucratic stuff. This does not necessarily mean they actually complete projects. It does mean they tend to keep their job and get viewed as competent, even if they may not be, really.
A good reason to take a staff job is you are good at the planning part and not so good at being an entrepreneur and would like to actually get paid for your work. I have no idea how many people fit this profile versus how many people are good at playing the game without actually getting all that much done.
Then we have the problem of previous experience. How many 10 billion projects do we have in the whole country? And maybe they take 10-15 years to finish. You might get one chance at managing and then it’s time for retirement.
When projects of this size start they often have “wicked problems” [0] which demand a lot of competence.
Right now I would guess a few hundred, going back and adjusting for inflation it’s easily thousands. For scale a single aircraft carrier costs more than 10 billion. The US operates at a scale that’s hard to comprehend.
Also,100 million dollar projects also run into Wicked problems.
The government doesn’t need the best of the best for this stuff they just need basic competence.