I was a contractor at a Boeing office a while ago. The purpose of the project was not to do any actual work on the project. The purpose was to convince the government to extend the project by many years and millions of dollars. The government seemed to encourage this behavior. It’s the only company where I have worked where I and my team were yelled at for being ahead of schedule or ahead of other teams because we were making them look bad.
That sound like a tactic that may not be restricted to Federal government contractors.