If I had critical infrastructure fail because I failed to fix it I would be fired.
Sure: if you directly failed to fix something, you could indeed be responsible.
But that's not the position your national leaders are in. Joe Biden does not do maintenance on Ohio trains, nor is he anywhere in the management structure of the company that oversees maintenance on Ohio trains, nor does he carry out oversight of national train maintenance.
And not only that, but the Obama-era safety regulation that Trump scrapped and that the Democrats have not reinstated would have made no difference to this particular event anyway, because the train did not meet the hazard staus that required the additional brake technology.
There are some things that are so important they are not allowed to go wrong ever.
All eyes are on America’s railways following the calamitous derailment of a freight train in East Palestine, Ohio. On Fe
www.politifact.com
And it doesn't matter how much effort the politicians and companies put in, it just takes one engineer, driver etc. having an off-day or even an off-minute to end up with a crash. There are some things that will inevitably go wrong at some point, even if by sheer dumb bad luck. There are so many working parts, individuals and organisations involved in this sort of thing that you have to assume that accidents are inevitable. Occasionally, they are going to involve trains carrying toxic chemicals.
The role of government regulations is to find a reasonable middle point where safety meets a certain standard without incurring such high costs that the thing being regulated becomes economically unviable. Sure, the case may exist for more regulation, but that's not the same thing as the existing regulations being negligently inadequate.