Rural Americans don't tend to think that the government is a functional entity and that going through that chain will net anything.

They may have a valid point since only money talks in government these days.

Money was the only thing that ever talked in government, the problem is that people have allowed the mandate to grow so outrageously that it's gotten out of hand. I love the original mission of the EPA, which was to do through regulation what was, owing to scale, not feasible in the courts: To assess tangible damage to the property of everyone downwind or downstream of you, and limit it at the source.

Every expansion of that mandate seriously perverts the whole institution, and allows them to justify basically any course of action through a vague mental framework, by means of a network of suggestible and mentally soft bureaucrats who want more than anything to keep their job, no matter how immoral the duties of their office are or have become.

A form of scope creep then, it seems?

Perhaps you are wondering why you are being down-voted, since your comment is well-meant and deserves a response. The problem is that arguments like yours are a bit of a fig-leaf covering a system that is designed to work around exactly the process you are talking about.

For the last seventy years or, western democracies have moved power away from traditional branches of government and into the hands of agencies, because political movements were fed up with the slowness, dark compromises and voter-oriented showmanship of traditional democratic machinery.

And indeed those systems really are slow, messy and give incomplete results. So when agencies do behave badly, it is not very helpful (or even true) to say that the tedious checks-and-balance systems that the agencies exist to work around are an effective recourse.