Unfortunately, some powerful people are extremely irresponsible.
Sadly, that's not necessarily the case. In fact there's a metric I just ran across that basically measures your responsibility vs. power. And yes, responsibility w/o power to influence is very much a thing.
Usually it's the case of being unempowered but effectively being dismissable for any undesired circumstances.
Everybody knows that this quote comes from the sudo(1) command on Linux :-)