Look, yes there are vested interests in DC that are entrenched and don't go away with each administration. Yes, many of them are in the alphabet soup departments (CIA/NSA). But they aren't "masters" dictating policy to their "puppets". They are guys that can close the George Washington Bridge and mess up your week. You pick a fight with the CIA and they can cause you all manner of problems. Even in the State Department there are upper level civil servants that can undermine you without ever showing their hands. As a President, or even as the head of a department, you have to decide if you are going to pick that fight, or are you going to "go along to get along". The reason that Cheney "stove piped" certain organizations within the intelligence agency was to give them oversized influence. And it worked for a while. But then their failings were exposed, Cheney over reached and exposed Plame, and the serious trouble started for him. Bush ended up sidelining him. Again, do you fight for Cheney or do you dump him and keep working with the huge swath of people that can screw with you on a daily basis in little ways?
The banking industry is no different. They can screw with you in multiple ways. It's a matter of how much they cooperate, what advance notice you get of trouble, and what deals are made, when, with whom, for what reasons. Big ones are self driven, but smaller yet more numerous ones can be diverted, delayed, or restructured to hurt you. So do you fight it or work with it.
Every politician, every leader, everyone that works the national stage will be exposed to this. What battles do I fight, and when do I cooperate to avoid the battle. The smarter people constantly look for opportunities to eliminate these folks. Let them screw up publicly and a department can become "the night of the long knives". In the process, certain behaviors can be tagged within that department as "toxic". Great way to change cultures.
People tried to warn Obama about this problem. Cheney had arranged for "leave behinds", people who were effectively political appointees but put into civil service jobs. Obama was told to figure out where they were and work to address it in some fashion, even if to just marginalize them. It was predictable that several departments would be filled with these folks and cause trouble. It's how you ended up with the largest oil spill ever in the Gulf. It's how "fast and furious" never got shut down when it should have. It's how we stayed in Iraq way too long, and are staying in Afghanistan too long as well. If you don't "clean house" when the opportunities present themselves, these people will end up "controlling" you and your administration. I'm fully convinced that Obama tried to make peace with the CIA by not prosecuting anyone for torture, only to have them decide that they could do anything, and have.
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