> On a side note, it feels conspiratorial to explain failure as, "there's double agents on the inside sabotaging the effort"
There are people currently heading government agencies that lobbied or fought against those agencies. See the CFPB and EPA. It's not a conspiracy–it's reality.
Politicians underfunding programs, then suggesting we should cut or privatize them because they performed poorly, all intentionally, is a well known and mostly open fact, not a closely guarded secret conspiracy.
Why do we humans do that? Why doesn't failure cause introspection/examination rather than excuse making?
On a side note, it feels conspiratorial to explain failure as, "there's double agents on the inside sabotaging the effort"