> 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.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture for a discussion of this topic.

> conspiratorial

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.