and that’s how you get bully psychopath CEOs sexually harassing people, infusing their religious / racist biases on the hiring process, etc.
Would much rather have HR + bureaucratic tedium than to be beholden to unbridled CEO whims.
But with principled leadership and monitoring, guidance, and procedures from HR, a great deal of this (and the legal, risk, and financial pain resulting) can be avoided, or at least, caught early.
It’s incredible to think that you’re taking the existence of bad behavior that happens despite these checks & balances as evidence that the checks & balances do nothing.
In a private company, the CEO can simply fire anyone in HR who stands up to them, no questions asked. In toxic situations HR often actively covers for bad behavior because the perpetrator signs their pay checks.
Not to say HR is useless and many times they can be an effective check on behavior. But as we've seen in some of these high profile cases of misconduct, HR has enabled abusers by taking their side against victims.
That's less true within the executive branch than between it and other branches; the main one relating to DoJ is the Senate confirmation process and the hope that the Senate won't confirm stooges of a corrupt President to leadership roles in the DoJ.
That isn't particularly reliable, however, making DoJ not a consistently strong constraint.
Same attitude for any type of employee towards any external consultant. They think: that's my job, I can do it cheaper, otherwise I'll just leave and hire myself back as a consultant and double my salary - but never have the skills or the guts to actually do it.