Exactly what is happening to PG&E. Heavily regulated by the state PUC, a commission of socialist bureaucrats in California. PG&E is damned if they do, damned if they don't - on anything. My wife worked as a manager at PG&E, and often complained about the PUC crippling PG&E from being successful. They forced PG&E to divest their most profitable ventures, giving them to 3rd-party companies, but forced PG&E to maintain and pay for the infrastructure. How many companies can do business like that and survive? State regulation strangled the company, now they want more regulation?
Its not just the PUC.
All utilities are subject to multiple layers of regulators. The PUC is just one of them.
All of them inflate costs.
I did an analysis once of the manpower devoted to maintenance and replacement of gas pipelines (mainly retail/last mile). The admin back end and overhead FTE’s were about 3X the people in the field actually digging up and replacing pipe.