“If you think everybody in the government is bad you’re wrong.”
Even honest people get hired by institutions that have dishonest leaders. The collective mindset of an institution is set by the top leaders. They reward behavior of subordinates that is in harmony with the leader’s idea of good/bad, right/wrong, desirable/undesirable. That results in self-selection down the line. Employees whose personal world-view is more in harmony with the leadership tend to stay and get promoted if only by survival selection. Those whose world-view in incompatible tend to find reasons to go elsewhere.
I have also found that a physician’s axiom “obstruction begets infection” is also a powerful axiom of organizational behavior. In medicine, when a part of the body that should be open becomes blocked, like a skin pore, then it is not uncommon that the area inside the blockage develops an infection. The only way for the infection to be resolved is for the drainage to be restored.
Similarly, if an executive can sufficiently insulate himself from being accountable to others, he tends to start doing things that normally would not be permitted. We see this time and time again in organizations where the leadership is assured of its budget and can insulate itself from any meaningful oversight. I think that is exactly what accounts for the behavior of several cabinet-level agencies in the current administration like the EPA.
It is time for honest people to wake up to the fact that such corrupt leaders are exploiting their personal integrity. The corrupt leader’s corruption is enabled in part by the willingness of sincere employees to give 110% on their jobs. An agency full of grifting brutes is not nearly as effective!
People who worked for the Japanese and German governments in World War 2 weren’t all ‘bad people’ either.