Consequential failure without consequences to the authors of the failures

From Adverse Selection of Leaders by Arnold Kling.  The subheading is Another Organizational Problem.

Kling points out that we have three very recent examples of substantial government institutional failure.  I have added a couple others.

The Fed and the Administration letting the inflation genie out of the bottle.

The CDC and its comprehensive Covid-19 failure.

The Treasury Department and the bank failures.

      

The Intelligence Community and their institutional failure in promoting false Trump-Russia collusion stories.

Homeland Security and their efforts to censor speech indirectly through Tech companies.

These are very recent, very real, very public and very consequential failures.  Lives have been destroyed, health wrecked, fortunes lost, and trust undermined, etc.  

Kling points out:

There is much similarity in these examples.

The public has been poorly served

No public official has accepted blame

No public official has suffered any consequences

No independent commissions have been chartered by Congress to propose reforms of the agencies involved

The agencies subsequently asked for, and typically were granted, even more authority

The last bullet is the most discouraging to me. When an agency fails and a crisis ensues, the agency often comes out of the crisis with more power than it had before. Think about what means in terms of incentives to avoid crises.

Healthy systems self-correct.  We are missing that right now.