“This is an interesting commentary on how big government is basically dysfunctional. “
Decades ago I worked for the company that built 80% of the world’s civilian aircraft crash recorders, the “black boxes.” (They were actually orange and yellow with black stripes.) We needed to go from carbon resistors to metal film. It was a no-risk engineering change which improved the unit’s producibility and reliability. For nearly a year the FCC failed to approve the change. In frustration, as we were out of carbon resistors, I called our permanent employee at the FCC’s building. He told me that each Monday he’d start walking the change around the building for signature, but frequently, the people who needed to sign were not there that week. Around Thursday people who had signed already would hunt him up and look at the signature sheet. If it wasn’t approved they’d take their signatures off the sheet. This is because if there was a crash over the weekend and the cause was traced to a resistor they didn’t want their names on a document that would have affected a change unless everybody had signed it off. This was the case with everything we submitted to the government.
I concluded that the purpose of federal agencies was to protect themselves and their members, not the public.
Cushy jobs with endless perks (lobbying) breed this type of behavior.
The American frontier was not won safely and a step at a time. Nor was the race to the moon. Nor the discovery of the new world. No significant development in technology, medicine or exploration has been without mortal danger and chaos.