Even if it was ‘just incompetence’ 95% of the time it would still be irrelevant to the average HN reader, since the remaining 5% would still be too much to ever feasibly track.
As there are tens of thousands of government departments, offices, committees, etc… with some amount of decision making power.
And as there are an exponentially large number of subtle ways the 5% of bad apples could influence the 95%, via a few degrees of separation, that cannot be easily reasoned out.
Sometimes bad behavior really is just incompetence