This is absolutely a thing.

I worked at a fortune small-cap where the IT department was absolutely insidious. They would undermine anyone who they didn't like, or who opposed their nonsense. I wrote a lot of backend stuff, and they would spend far more effort and money denying us servers and resources than it would have taken to simply get those things for us. They'd tell us developers we couldn't use the OS's our products targeted, and yet they'd be using them.

They undermined their own CIO time after time; most lasted about 18 months.

Then, the company hired a sociable, intelligent, woman as CIO.

Within six months, she'd (rightly) fired the ENTIRE department. They just didn't see it coming.