It's nice when federal agencies are funded and led by people who aren't trying to sabotage them from the inside.

Ignoring all other considerations, the current incumbent political party in the US presidency on average tends to produce effective & functioning federal agencies, and the other party on average tends to produce corrupt & dysfunctional federal agencies.

I try to point this out frequently because voters tend to ignore this kind of thing until it affects them personally, or they read about some isolated grievance in the news. But it really should be considered a more important topic.

>and the other party on average tends to produce corrupt & dysfunctional federal agencies

the federal agencies are mostly employees have been there through many administrations. How do they suddenly become corrupt and dysfunctional besides these employees (90% of the current incumbent political party) suddenly becoming corrupt and dysfunctional?

Employees will often internalize past actions they took, whether forced to by their bosses or not, as good actions. they will even build up a worldview to support those actions. For the alternative is to accept that you were bad, or even evil.

That means leadership can change the course of an organization by ruthlessly making them do other things until people internalize those things as the right thing, or leave.

That only explains decay though, not the magical idea that under the right party things spring back. The best to hope for is a democratic president to slow down the decay. But it is simply so much easier to tear things down than to build things up, that it will take a lot of democrats to see actual improvement.

Employees still have to follow their politically appointed bosses at the top or risk being fired.

This is mostly true and is part of what helped soften the absolute disaster that the Trump administration was. In multiple instances, Trump and his ilk wanted to do absolutely illegal and unconstitutional things but we're thwarted by career civil servants.

However, they've learned. At the end of his term, Trump created a new classification of employment, Schedule F. Schedule F employees did not have civil-service protections and could be fired on a whim. Fortunately, he lost the election before he could use it. Biden removed it.

Now, Trump-aligned groups like the Heritage Foundation are running programs to recruit Trump loyalists whose main and almost sole qualifications is loyalty to Trump (see Project 2025). They don't want a repition of last time where federal employees had the gall to actually follow the law instead of the dictator.

  voters tend to ignore this kind of thing until it affects them personally

And when it finally becomes a problem that cannot be ignored, scapegoats will be found and used, even if they have to be invented in a fairy tale (internet conspiracy).

Often it suffices to blame the agencies themselves, citing the very failures caused by mismanagement, corruption, and underfunding as evidence of the foolishness of using government agencies to do things. This in turn is the kind of nonsense you can get people to believe if you've systematically misinformed them while also convincing them they can't trust other sources, which is another well-known strategy of the same political faction