Very sorry to read about your abysmal experience, Michelle, but after 27 years in the USA and after various experiences dealing with all manner of government agencies I can’t say it’s at all surprising, and I’ve heard from friends about similar experiences. The USA has probably almost the worst government bureaucracy of any OECD country, a legacy of two things. First, the “hire from the very bottom” mentality that began with the Great Depression when government became “the employer of last resort.” So if you’re totally unmotivated, a supreme under-performer, and are able to do pointless things for years without rocking the boat (the most essential characteristic) then you’re an ideal candidate for government service, whether at the Federal, State, or local level. Anyone who’d actually want to make anything slightly less dysfunctional is either not hired in the first place or, if hired by accident, rapidly ejected. Secondly, US citizens in general are extremely complacent because they have no idea what things are like elsewhere. Yes, of course all government bureaucracies tend to extreme inefficiency and defective process flows, but there’s no pressure to change anything because no one is aware that things don’t have to be that way. People make jokes about the DMV (for example) but there’s no real agitation to make any positive changes. While covid-19 will in the end kill very few people (as a total percentage of the entire population) it has already exposed the fact the USA is merely a third-world country that happens to have a handful of first-world technology companies that provide a superficial illusion of modernity. As everything is pretty much broken, the big banks feel zero need to improve their own capabilities because they can coast along just like everyone else.