This could be seen as either straightforward corruption or a gamble on the Starship platform for future Mars exploration.
There are very sound economic reasons why rockets for Moon exploration like Saturn-V were built the way they were. Saturn-V was around $35-40B in today's money for 13 rockets and 6 landings (excluding lander, crew costs). It took 5.5 years from greenlight to first successful orbital flight (which was also its first flight). Starship will likely meet this target of 6 landings after about 20 years of development, $25B R&D (excluding crew/lander contracts), and possibly about $5B in launch costs. Asymptotic costs will of course be much lower, but launch costs do not dominate space exploration costs. The platform might be capable of Mars missions one day - but it's not clear how far out that goal is.