The subway rail problem for SF doesn't seem to me to have a root cause of American governments lack expertise (which they do, to be certain) but rather simply that Americans are dishonest. Tutor-Perini thought they could chisel off a couple dollars by using inadequate rails because they didn't think SFMTA's supervising engineers would notice. They were right: it was a third-party audit that discovered the problem.

As a country we basically venerate fraud. This has consequences which could easily have been predicted.