Out sourcing to consultants is not the problem. The problem is that we don't have the ability to manage those consultants. We are also outsourcing management of consultants, including gathering requirements. At no point does anyone get cost control as part of their goals, and in many places they get instructions that are contrary to good cost control.

You honestly think that the federal government would be more effective at managing consultants? The majority of additional costs in any underground job fall into one of two buckets: third party disputes or differing site conditions. A national agency will do no better than a local agency at managing these and will probably be worse because they won’t have any relationship with the locals. At the end of the day an infrastructure project has to be built locally, not in Washington.

I won’t even touch the fact that most infrastructure jobs are only partially funded by the federal government with the remainder funded by local tax or rate payers. The federal government has no interest in cost controls beyond their own money and the residents of State X have no interest in funding more of the infrastructure of State Y than they already do.

I didn't say anything about federal control. Others have, but i'm not seeing anyone interested in solving the problem at any level

Yeah, but that's technical knowledge, not project-management knowledge.

The article argues that the real gap is not in people who know how to build things, but in dedicated civil servants who know how to manage those people.

And that is a much more transferrable skill than "how to build this kind of rail tunnel through that kind of soil composition" or whatever.

Just saying “that is a much more transferable skill” does not make it so. Effective management on any infrastructure job is, again, highly dependent on relationships with local agencies and the local population.

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>Tunneling and underground work is a uniquely localized specialty. A national organization that runs underground work is going to still need specialized knowledge for each region both because of local ground conditions and local contracting practices. It is very difficult to export know-how from one area to another. Site sampling/testing practices are not even consistent across regions.

Read the report the article is about. Milan fills this role for the rest of Italy and somehow figures it out just fine.

Italy is 3/4 the size of California.

Does Milan run all of the EU’s jobs too?

Irrelevant to the point. If the south of Italy is different geologically, the size of Italy vs anything else doesn't matter.

You think geology is the only thing that determines "local ground conditions and local contracting practices"? FYI: in the underground industry, "ground conditions" isn't a synonym for "type of dirt" and "contracting practices" isn't a synonym for "geology."

Local contracting practices are only tangentially related to geology. They are very closely related to geography - hence the word "local."

The whole point is this stuff isn't contracted out.

Local contracting practices is about the CONSTRUCTION COMPANY, not the consultants. You know, the general contractors and subcontractors.