So I first heard about it as a young man in the early 2010s when I encountered a woman who worked in the financial regulation sector in the UK who told me exactly what I just summed up in the first paragraph. Google “revolving door $INDUSTRY” and you’ll get a pretty good feel for how widespread it is. Naturally it’s downplayed by the official narrative such as in the last of the following three links:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman_Sachs#Personnel_%22r...

https://cspl.blog.gov.uk/2017/02/08/regulators-and-the-revol...

If you’re based in the UK, buy an issue or two of Private Eye who will often name such people as well as the staggering amount of general corruption at play in UK politics.

As for the last paragraph, I recently heard some system thinkers express similar sentiments based on how FDR managed to enact real change and how most presidents have failed to achieve much in comparison since.

> During his first term, FDR quickly found that the federal bureaucracy, specifically at the Treasury and State Departments, moved too slowly for his tastes. FDR often chose to bypass these established channels, creating emergency agencies in their stead.

https://millercenter.org/president/fdroosevelt/domestic-affa...

In time however, these new agencies become bloated bureaucratic nightmares themselves. In my opinion, the circle of life extends to organisations as well life forms. I view economic booms and busts as a “changing of the seasons”: old organisations that can no longer compete die and new ones take their place. The problems start occurring when government intervenes to keep zombie companies around because they’re “too big to fail”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_company