When the head of Latvia's anti-corruption bureau quietly stepped away a year before his term ended, he framed it as retirement — but his departure surfaced a deeper unease about what institutions become when they grow in size and budget while shrinking in consequence. KNAB, the agency entrusted with guarding public integrity, had accumulated staff, salaries, and resources across nine years of leadership, yet the cases that mattered most were either abandoned or handed off to European prosecutors. The question Latvia now sits with is an old one: whether the failure belongs to a person, a struct