Slightly different take here - maybe it's not distrust but disbelief, rooted in individuals' personal experience with the government. More than once I have been

Slightly different take here - maybe it's not distrust but disbelief, rooted in individuals' personal experience with the government. More than once I have been in water cooler chats with other government technology contractors who (jokingly) muse "can you believe we made it to the moon?" or (less jokingly) "do you think we will ever be able to do 'moon shot' program again?" I often find it hard to square my personal experience working inside government bureaucracies with the fact that a government project of this scale and ambition was so successful - generally ending on the question "what changed?" or "if they could do that then, why can't we do even XYZ now?"