It’s my impression that you’ve uncovered a tiny tiny tip of a very very large iceberg. One simple answer is that not fixing a pothole has almost zero political cost. However, not organizing a huge mediagenic search when tourists from a developed country might die could have a massive blowback. So I think they will just tweak the budget of something else later when everyone else has forgotten in order to pay for the search.

But think about the police departments in places like Los Angeles, Seattle, Baltimore, and Chicago. They quietly pay settlements of tens of millions of dollars per year for police misconduct of all kinds. Somehow these costs are buried in opaque sections of the budget that no one is willing to disclose. It never appears as a line item. It would take multiple annual freedom of information act applications to start to get to the bottom of what’s happening there.