"...we want to get as much under construction as we possibly can, so it would cost more to cover it up than it would to finish it. Always we wanted to give the board…an unacceptable alternative, so that we would take them down the road we wanted to go. If we hadn’t done that, everything would have bogged down into bureaucratic debate, and quibbling, and so forth that goes on all the time."

...

> But Metro proved hard to kill. The financing bust inspired another round of studies, but these tended to find that paring down the system based on what was already under construction was surprisingly difficult. The individual lines were “like colored wires on a B-movie time bomb: clip one and the whole thing explodes”:

"Deleting any route would provoke the affected jurisdiction to demand tens of millions of dollars back from the Authority, with interest. It was easier for WMATA to keep borrowing, especially since each cut would only save a small percentage of the system cost."

Looks like the general's plan actually worked!