This is not people explicitly wanting something for nothing. The issue is that in a corporation the incentives of the engineer and the person who controls budgets are at odds.
The bean counter won't really be rewarded (not directly at least) for the engineer and the engineer's team being successful, but they'll be definitely penalized for being haphazard with finances. Ergo, their incentive is to be a stingy bastard by default.
This then puts a high bar on anything that is a cost, which mostly penalizes low expenditures counterintuitively. A line item of $200 is basically not worth fighting for. Something that costs $20000 is generally easier to justify in terms of effort even just subconsciously. Ultimately both line items take asymptotically the same effort to push through, but the larger one appears (at first sight) much more important. It may be that the $200 item is more valuable in the end of course.
The bean counter won't really be rewarded (not directly at least) for the engineer and the engineer's team being successful, but they'll be definitely penalized for being haphazard with finances. Ergo, their incentive is to be a stingy bastard by default.
This then puts a high bar on anything that is a cost, which mostly penalizes low expenditures counterintuitively. A line item of $200 is basically not worth fighting for. Something that costs $20000 is generally easier to justify in terms of effort even just subconsciously. Ultimately both line items take asymptotically the same effort to push through, but the larger one appears (at first sight) much more important. It may be that the $200 item is more valuable in the end of course.