Most of these consultants themselves are not making all of that money. They work for companies like Accenture which bill their time out at several hundred dollars per hour, but then pay the consultants much less.
For example, the 400k/year figure quoted only amounts to about a $200/hr bill rate. That's far from the worst I've ever heard on a project like this.
When I consulted via a firm, they regularly billed clients $200-$300/hr for the work of developers and operations folks who were getting paid ~$20-25/hr.
Granted, this was in fly-over country, but the gap between billable-hour and developer-hour is quite often massive.
The upside of this is that their customers are used to paying those rates. If you are self-employed or work for a small consultancy you can undercut them and still make a bag of money.
can you? My experience has been that large corporations, never mind the government, are perfectly happy to pay 2x or 3x the rates in order to deal with someone large.
For example, the 400k/year figure quoted only amounts to about a $200/hr bill rate. That's far from the worst I've ever heard on a project like this.