Absolutely! Spending policies are often sold as cost cutting policies (spend $1 to get back $1.15).
It can get even more complicated when your new policy leads to large projects, many large, multi-year projects have certain assumptions baked into them which can turn out to be wrong. Years ago I was a minor participant in a root cause analysis for a government program that lasted 10 years and went way over budget. Our biggest finding was that the assumptions made when budgeting this project turned out to be incorrect and far too optimistic. These assumptions were actually fairly reasonable at the time they were made though.
It can get even more complicated when your new policy leads to large projects, many large, multi-year projects have certain assumptions baked into them which can turn out to be wrong. Years ago I was a minor participant in a root cause analysis for a government program that lasted 10 years and went way over budget. Our biggest finding was that the assumptions made when budgeting this project turned out to be incorrect and far too optimistic. These assumptions were actually fairly reasonable at the time they were made though.