This ridiculous situation happened this year in a local government

A design firm was contracted to design a new water treatment plant. The design for the new administration building has been stamped and approved by the client. The job was past on the the construction contractor and they started implementing a plan to get the administration building built.

Then, somebody that works for the client in a office of power got hold of the plans. He sees that the workers in the admin building will have a larger offices than he does. He gets on the phone and calls one of his lessors to tell them the plans need to be changed. The design firm was told this, they did a quick estimate on their fees. They found that if the plans needed to be scraped and the building shrunk, overall there would be no money saved. In fact, man-hour-waste meant it could be a higher cost for a building with a significant square footage decrease. The idiot approved it, wasted all that money because of his ego.