I don't think this style of regulation is limited to FAA. FDA does not independently test all drugs either. They just review and ensure the drug companies' tests are acceptable.
And FINRA is made up of brokers and banks but overseen by the SEC. The EPA doesn't directly monitor every factory. The NTSB sets general testing guidelines and standards and seems to have greatly increased auto and aviation safety, but they can't police everything and at least to the public seem to regulate after the fact.
The general term, I believe, is self-regulatory-organization. The theory, I guess, is that the government sets the laws and says very generally, "no fraud", and "you have to write your own rules and make sure they're good", but offers little technical guidance otherwise. I think this could work well if there were very heavy penalties for failures to self-police, but in practice the revolving door between government and industry incentivizes slap on the wrist style punishment. It's a hard problem and I don't think we're doing well over the last few decades.
... and for most of the agencies, it's not that their budget is small or the agency itself is incompetent: it's what's required by law and they can't override it unless Congress decides to change the laws.
You don't want regulatory agencies creating law on their own though. Not only is that unconstitutional but the reason its unconstitutional is because you would inevitably end up with some busybody who is not accountable to the people massively over stepping their power and creating tyranny.
Regulatory agencies create "laws" all the time. When Congress creates legislation, they rarely spell out all the details and implementations. This is left to the agency to interpret, and they have a wide latitude in both interpretation and enforcement.
You're referring to Chevron deference and/or Auer deference, and it is worth noting that those are in the long process of being curtailed/attacked heavily. :(
Chevron defense is separate and distinct from Auer defense. The Chevron defense applies to Congressional legislation, Auer is applied to an agency's own vague regulations. I have no issue with restricting the Auer defense. If an agency issues vague regulations, then that's their own fault. You're correct that they're both being attacked, but the underlying issue won't go away; Congress can't/won't dictate every detail of legislation especially when it comes to general/vague legislation. They have neither the inclination nor domain knowledge to do so.
While I do study relevant US laws as required in my job (requiring familiarity with how law operates in countries where we operate), I am not an American, but I do understand certain things with regards to the US constitution and relevant case laws.
The Congress originally meets only for a few months' time, usually less than 6 months. This is due to the reality of the time, where travel is slow and representatives only receive a comparable salary to most people. Thus, it is exactly empowered to delegate certain powers to the executive branch. As someone mentioned, the administrative law is a cornerstone law and yet it delegates many powers to the executive branch.
In fact, said law and many, many, many similar (federal) laws have been upheld constitutional in the Supreme Court. There are certain powers that only Congress can do, and cannot be delegated to the executive branch, but it is clearly laid out in the constitution what those are (notably spending). Now I said federal because in certain states, the legislature can only delegate in very narrow situations (usually only in cases where lives would be in danger or in the protection of properties and where a need of immediate response is demonstrated).
So I'm confused why are you saying that is unconstitutional, in fact American history shows a very different answer. If you think that should be not allowed, you're entitled to your own opinion. However unless I read it incorrectly, the constitution, even considering the various amendments, is unfortunately not aligned with your opinion.
> the constitution, even considering the various amendments, is unfortunately not aligned with your opinion.
Sure it is. Article I of the Constitution says that all legislative power shall be vested in Congress. That means anything that has the force of law--and all Federal regulations created by executive branch agencies under the current US regulatory regime have the force of law; you can be fined or jailed for violating them--has to be passed by Congress using the process described in Article I. So any Federal regulation that has not been passed by that process--i.e., every one of them--is unconstitutional.
The fact that current US jurisprudence disagrees with that statement just illustrates how far current US jurisprudence has diverged from what the Constitution actually says. The status of Federal regulations is by no means the only example: current US jurisprudence says that Congress can regulate farmers growing crops for their own personal use because of the Commerce Clause; and that a city government can use the eminent domain power to evict people from their homes and turn the property over to a private development corporation (that ends up never developing the land anyway), and that counts as a "public use" under the Fifth Amendment.
> You don't want regulatory agencies creating law on their own though.
While I agree with this as a matter of personal opinion, it is not at all the actual fact in our current regulatory regime. Federal regulatory agencies create law all the time. Look at the Federal Register; every regulation in there has the force of law and was written by a regulatory agency.
> you would inevitably end up with some busybody who is not accountable to the people massively over stepping their power and creating tyranny.
I'm afraid this is the logical consequence of a majority of people falling for the lie that "government can't do things as efficiently as the private sector".
When people vote for politicians who say
"government is wasteful",
"there's too much red tape"
I don't think so, testing like you refer to is not scalable and even more inefficient.
Letting an external auditors understand all the small technical details and test them independently will basically halt any progress. It might make this specific change safer but for the long run will slow down innovation and development of better and safer products.
This has some similarity to software development- we test much better but prefer to move faster to achieve a better overall quality and be able to fix issues faster and better
When politicians say "government is wasteful" or "government can't do things as efficiently as the private sector", what they're saying is that their management style is wasteful.
Would somebody asserting that about _their_ _own_ _job_ even make it past the interview in the private sector?
Or they could be saying that centralized monopolies are rarely efficient. That is certainly my experience. For example, SpaceX undercut NASA by a factor of about 10, according to this FT report: https://www.ft.com/content/25e2292b-a910-41c8-9c55-09096895f...
'Not normative' doesn't mean 'not in compliance with ethical norms'. It means not pertaining to ethical norms. It's not the correct word, however you twist it.
Exactly! And when all US companies refuse to lower their prices, they should start sourcing from foreign companies to increase competition!
Oh hey look, I'm signing yet another contract with an arbitration clause when signing up for a cell phone service. Must be my fault that all of them require the arbitration clause...
I think the worlds greatest agency couldn't evaluate a so complex system as the Max. They should just have said no.
I believe it is foremost a complexity issue, and the MCAS(?) failure is just one of the many things that could go wrong, that actually did. Boing probably have more issues with the plane that is waiting to surface given their culture ...
It's a management function. If someone comes to you and says "We want to rewrite everything so it runs on a Raspberry PI powered by a hamster wheel" you don't need to ask about the engineering spec of the hamster wheel.
The Max MCAS was only marginally more plausible in overview. Details were never going to rescue it.
Indeed. The FDA just has a multi-step process where you need to define how you'll run your trials, what data you'll collect and whether it's enough to get approval.
The FDA very carefully reviews the submissions, requires validation of tests and safeguards so data can't easily be manipulated. But the system is built on trust. If a company wants to manipulate, fake or exclude negative data they can. They'll likely get caught, but not always.
Yeah, people are are drastically underestimating how enormous the testing apparatus is at a company like Boeing. It's thousands of employees. Expecting the FAA to duplicate those efforts is ridiculous.
I don't know much about the FAA, but as someone who works in healthcare, I know the FDA conducts regular audits of medical device manufacturers.
They roll in for a week, request access to everything and everywhere, then pick a handful of areas (randomly) to do a full deep-dive. Generally, if a company is cutting corners, discrepancies will exist in many areas and they'll quickly spot one or more of them. I assume the FAA operates similarly.
And ISTR that just around the time I entered the medical device industry, that this is exactly what happened to Abbott and they were forced to remove some of their products from the market for months until they could bring their quality system back up to FDA satisfaction.
Similar for many other things, the report most countries based the safety of roundup on was written by Monsanto itself. Most countries only check these reports for completeness and obvious errors, they don't try to run the studies themselves. However that "error checking" of the report is something where the FAA fucked up, the information on the MCAS provided by Boeing was completely out of date, either the documented testing procedures where incomplete or the FAA did not notice that the MCAS handled cases far outside of its original specification.
Of course the FDA has to regulate 10s of 1000s of companies\drugs\trials. The FAA basically just oversees Boeing and Airbus in the large commercial jet market and either offers 10s of models...
The FAA oversees every flying object in the US. Not just new models, but also config changes to existing models, continued airworthiness, all the design org and production org certification of manufacturers (per site) and suppliers (again, per site). Which is quite a workload, especially in a world as complex as aerospace.
That there's multiple other airplane manufacturers, not targeting the "large passenger jet" market, but more towards the "general aviation" market?
Textron (Cessna, Beechcraft, hawker), Piper, Carlson, Viking, ... There's dozens of aircraft manufacturers (I have intentionally not listed those who make hit planes, but I think they too fall under FAA checks).
I would not actually be surprised if the small airplane manufacturers puts substantially higher load on FAA than Airbus and Boeing do.
The FAA oversees all portions of pilot licensing, airplane manufacture, airplane service, operations, traffic control, idiots with drones, etc, for general and commercial aviation in the entire country.
Certifying new commercial models is but a small portion of what they do. By number of employees and budget I would bet that ATC is actually their biggest responsibility. That's not to say that they should just rubber stamp all that...
