That makes too much sense, how else will they get a cut of the action if the project is not on the billions of dollars? How else will they give the impression they are working hard if half or more of the work has been done already?

That is not how it is done, to begin with they need to create a commission full of politicians which do not know anything about the topic and discuss for months how they will make this a reality, then create a second commission because they could not agree on the color of the interface, then finally green light will be given to the project, it will take twice as long and cost three times more than what it was projected while having less than half of the features, then they will declare this a success while a new commission is created to fix the bugs and mistakes incurred by the previous commissions.