When government is run by people that believe government is the problem, they seem to create more of them. This is a good example. We've seen this play out a lot over the past 15 years. Republicans appoint people they like and trust, not necessarily people qualified to do the job. Remember Bush saying that Brownie is doing a fine job when both were totally fucking up the Katrina disaster?
I pulled the following from the Wikipedia article on the Flint water crisis. I added bold text to highlight how ineptitude and bias from the Republican administration kept everybody in the dark regarding the result of poor decision making. It was all about reducing cost and not running government.
While the local outcry about Flint water quality was growing in early 2015, Flint water officials filed papers with state regulators purporting to show that "tests at Flint's water treatment plant had detected no lead and testing in homes had registered lead at acceptable levels."[36] The documents falsely claim that the city had tested tap water from homes with lead service lines, and therefore the highest lead-poisoning risks; in reality; the city does not know the locations of lead service lines, which city officials acknowledged in November 2015 after the Flint Journal/MLivepublished an article revealing the practice after obtaining documents through the Michigan Freedom of Information Act.[37] The Journal/MLive reported that the city had "disregarded federal rules requiring it to seek out homes with lead plumbing for testing, potentially leading the city and state to underestimate for months the extent of toxic lead leaching into Flint's tap water.
This is not a new story. When people running the system focus on cost above all else, they put up blinders to avoid information about the real cost of their decisions. They will fire or demote people that provide information counter to their own bias. And so, they get the information they want.
The Republican Party is the party of purposeful ignorance. It is corrupt because appointed party hacks making the decisions deliberately filter their information to justify their actions. It is venal because its leaders conveniently and falsely claim nobody could have known their cost cutting measures would have caused this. Because, you know, government is the problem, not the solution. At least when they run the government this might be true. As
@Jimdamick pointed out, there is "no accountability or even remorse" on the part of the leadership. They think they are "doing a fine job".
