Trust in science is so low in the US that this was bound to happen. The author's conclusion nails it:

But institutional failures like this aren’t just the aggregate failure of a number of irresponsible people, they are a failure of a cultural attitude that doesn’t demand excellence from everyone in order to get the job done.

I'll add though that when crisis happens the entity 'doing something about it' suddenly looks amazing, even if they were the cause. That means that it is a winning political strategy to create a lot of crisis so you can solve a few of them and look like a hero.