Volunteer DEF CON hackers dive into America's leaky water infrastructure

I am both heartened by the fact that there are volunteers willing to help society, but also very sad that this is even needed. Where and how has the American government - both sides i feel - so disastrously failed its people, that it is needed to rely on volunteers to help with something that i feel should have been managed by government.

Before anyone starts rambling on about politics too much on any side, i blame all sides. What i recall from my basic education so many decades ago is that government should help to provide at least some fundamental areas of infrastructure (e.g. roads and such, etc.), and then commerce (private enterprise, etc.) can take place above it, and than things proceed from there, yada yada.

I don't know what is more basic infrastructure than water and its associated management? Where is the NSA in all of this? What about Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), where are they in all of this?

Clearly, this story ticked me off, and apologies for that...but, if we're at the stage in society where volunteers is a viable solution for a very fundamental element in life...then clearly lots of other things have severely failed.

Most of our infrastructure was built a long time ago (except roads) and don’t actively see maintenance. No one from the current generations has had to pay for real impactful infrastructure for decades. Now that all the infrastructure is failing or has security holes nobody wants to pay for it to be fixed. If you look up major infrastructure repairs in the last few decades you will see much of what could have been long term fixes were reduced to short term fixes.

Properly fixing infrastructure has become expensive as construction costs have skyrocketed in the last few decades.

Look at the CHIPS bill, huge infrastructure gain but also was a part of the 9% inflation because building this infrastructure is expensive. The American people were warned about it causing inflation but wanted it anyways. When inflation hit they all conveniently forgot the cost of new infrastructure in the US and chose to cling to lies about how disastrous the last 4 years have been.

That is why today no one does anything about problems until a bridge collapses. You can make more money today by passing the buck to the next generation and passing blame to whoever came before you.