Government absolutely does pull those levers. I think people underestimate how closely utilities are regulated. It's a monopoly after all. The government tells

Government absolutely does pull those levers. I think people underestimate how closely utilities are regulated. It's a monopoly after all. The government tells them annually what their profit for the coming year will be. The state public utility / service commission determines how much profit a utility is allowed to make (really it's return on equity) based on federal guidelines. Every year the utility must make a rate case that includes what it's going to spend and why and why its shareholders deserve to get anything on top of that. If the utility has misbehaved that RoE number can literally be zero, though this would be rare. Punitive profit slashing (not quite that extreme) has definitely happened for major customer-facing IT issues and would probably happen for a major breach.