This has been a 50 year problem in the making, and whether it's for better or worse should be more carefully studied. Because here's my understanding of the history:
Through WW2 and the proliferating age of defense contractors, the government (mostly defense department, but also civilian agencies) stood almost on equal footing with contractors in their ability to design, scope, and evaluate big projects.
You would see scientists and in-house advisers at these departments able to expertly evaluate proposals/designs by contractors with sufficient background knowledge and tools to do so. They even worked closely with contractors to lay out the requirements and designs for systems, or products.
But, through the decades, a couple factors eroded this equal footing of the government / regulatory experts:
-- Shrinking of government budgets for (or unwillingness of the public to stomach) the ranks of Washington "bureaucrats" who represented this expert class of people (what harm is there in cutting "fat" from public servants who don't seem to produce anything tangible?)
-- More attractive pay, career potential, prestige, etc. of working in the private sector
-- Political distaste for being seen as working too closely with contractors
So what happened is that gradually but surely, government lost the tools to do these things themselves, and by sheer need to still have things approved, shifted the work onto industry.
What can you do when industry comes to you with new complicated designs for things, and you have no one who can assess (and no budget to pay for assessments of) whether those designs are safe? You ask the person proposing to critique themselves, and in many cases, they seem to know more than you anyway.
Of course, what in part probably led to our current situation.
As I said in the beginning, the pros and cons of operating a system in this way should be looked at.
As a society, my question is, how do we make it possible to choose to do these things in the way that produces the right outcome? For a start, I think we need to stop asking everyone to make uninformed votes about certain detailed things we don't understand, yet rely on every day. That definitely produces bad consequences for many issues.
The deep reason is the hollowing out of the technical professions. Engineering (not software 'engineering') is not in the scope of most college bound youth.
Claims aren't evidence. But testimony is evidence. How compelling that is depends on their credibility, qualifications, and whether there's corroborating evidence.
It is unclear if they are lacking technical expertise, but they are certainly being significantly more lax than one would want a regulatory body to be.
Through WW2 and the proliferating age of defense contractors, the government (mostly defense department, but also civilian agencies) stood almost on equal footing with contractors in their ability to design, scope, and evaluate big projects.
You would see scientists and in-house advisers at these departments able to expertly evaluate proposals/designs by contractors with sufficient background knowledge and tools to do so. They even worked closely with contractors to lay out the requirements and designs for systems, or products.
But, through the decades, a couple factors eroded this equal footing of the government / regulatory experts:
-- Shrinking of government budgets for (or unwillingness of the public to stomach) the ranks of Washington "bureaucrats" who represented this expert class of people (what harm is there in cutting "fat" from public servants who don't seem to produce anything tangible?)
-- More attractive pay, career potential, prestige, etc. of working in the private sector
-- Political distaste for being seen as working too closely with contractors
So what happened is that gradually but surely, government lost the tools to do these things themselves, and by sheer need to still have things approved, shifted the work onto industry.
What can you do when industry comes to you with new complicated designs for things, and you have no one who can assess (and no budget to pay for assessments of) whether those designs are safe? You ask the person proposing to critique themselves, and in many cases, they seem to know more than you anyway.
Of course, what in part probably led to our current situation.
As I said in the beginning, the pros and cons of operating a system in this way should be looked at.
As a society, my question is, how do we make it possible to choose to do these things in the way that produces the right outcome? For a start, I think we need to stop asking everyone to make uninformed votes about certain detailed things we don't understand, yet rely on every day. That definitely produces bad consequences for many issues.