It's not about prestige as much as budgets and "public/private collaboration", ie prior to Reagan and the "small government movements" most regulatory bodies ha

It's not about prestige as much as budgets and "public/private collaboration", ie prior to Reagan and the "small government movements" most regulatory bodies had well funded labs and engineering teams capable and authorized to do independent research in order to validate claims made by industry. post Reagan when the government budgets were cut and organisation asked to streamline/"rationalize" outsource and cut down on fluff the first thing cut were those labs as the new way of thinking was that they should let the regulated do their own safety research and that the government should merely check that the resulting documentation was conforming to formatting standards rather then validating the results. This causes situations where large companies basically gets to be both accused and judge in cases where the safety of their products are in question, as they are the only one who can realistically produce and present studies to the regulators on the safety of their products. And it's not limited to the Boeing, nor to government as the same ideas of "rationalization" is prevalent in the management textbooks most enterprise managers are trained from.