asleep at the switch

Probably an allusion to the important responsibilities of a railway switchman.

• "His vote demonstrates that the people of Philadelphia are not asleep at the switch, are not indifferent to their political duties."
• "My guardian angel had not been asleep at the switch."
• "It is sometimes difficult to guess whether a sentence has been garbled by the author or the typesetter […] . In either case, the editors were asleep at the switch."
• "Why America (but not Canada) failed to set up a needed synfuels industry."
• "“We all were asleep at the switch as the Chinese government decided to prioritise these clean energy technologies as a matter of national industrial strategy,” says Geoffrey Pyatt, a former US assistant secretary of energy and diplomat now at the advisory firm McLarty Associates."

• asleep at the wheel