Power line theft was my first thought as well. I was just at the FDR library and one thing that stood out was how uncertain/experimental he was: we think of FDR's work as "public works, new deal, social security, WWII" but per the library he came in basically saying, "this is a hard problem and what we've been doing hasn't worked. so we'll try other things, and some of them will work, some won't. we'll do more of the former and less of the latter over time and get better at fixing this."