Klein and Thompson argue in Abundance that government needs internal technical knowhow to oversee projects even when it contracts out their execution.

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  and so we need to build state capacity. When I started, the authority was 70% consultants, 30% state. Now it's 55% state and 45% consultant. In the Bay Area, a different story was playing out. In 2012, Bay Area Rapid Transit, the BART system, signed a contract with Alstom, a French rail car manufacturer, to deliver 775 cars for $2.58 billion. By 2023, though, something unusual had happened. The cars were coming in faster and cheaper than expected. The cost estimate was slashed by almost $400 million. One major source of savings, reported Trains.com, was BART's decision to have its own staff do more of the engineering work in-house. The project team has included engineers who have successfully completed new rail car projects at other agencies. Nor is this an isolated anecdote. Zachary Lisko's research found that increasing employment in State Departments of Transportation by one employee per 1,000 residents reduced the cost per mile of highway construction by 26%. Government cannot do everything itself, but it needs enough know-how to oversee the projects it is doing. Jen Palka is the founder of Code for America, a civic tech group that tried to build a bridge between the technology industry and the government in a bid to upgrade government services. The work was hard, fruitful, important, frustrating. She went on to

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