understanding is that the issue is of long standing--decades--and that a containment dam was damaged/jeopardized by a contractor and failed. The containment strategy might be questioned but apparently there is no money to remediate this enormous issue and so containment has been the policy for many many years and under multiple federal administrations. The actual negligent operations leading to the failure of the holding pond were, I thought, handled by private contractor but I may be 100% wrong about this. So who do we fire? The administrator who managed the bid for the contract?

Pre-post edit: attached is a wikipedia article on the Gold King Mine that explains in detail what happened. I believe it backs up most of what I've written above but adds a criticism of the EPA I had forgotten, namely that it new about this 24 hours before it warned the public. That failure to warn might well have appropriately led to somebody's firing, but I don't see what "millions and millions" of property damage the failure to warn caused (versus the actual breach).

As to whether the actual operations during which the breach occurred were ill-advised or negligent, given the limitations the EPA and its contractor were operating under as a result of the local government's unwillingness (for economic reasons relating to tourism) to accept a "Superfund" designation, I just don't have sufficient information to judge. That won't stop (indeed, hasn't stopped) you, however.

But read the link and tell me it's as simple as you want it to be.