I hope it costs those companies a ton of money to walk away from the auctioned contracts. Sounds like a typical problem of many public construction projects: They get evaluated on cost only, many companies (in bad faith or not) bid at too low prices and thus get the contract over other companies which might be much better set up to get the project to completion in time/in budget/on good standards. And as they are better set up, they likely have a better handle on real costs - as in actual subject experts evaluate costs, not just some sales/business people making optimistic estimates ("guesstimates"). And maybe even finance people thinking about stuff like possible higher inflation ahead of time and counting that in/hedging against that (not sure if hedging on inflation is a thing, but then again almost everything seems to be a thing in finance so I assume it is :P ).