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This is the kind of crap that makes me think the US is in real trouble. It’s like “quagmire” has replaced “competency” across all our institutions, and there’s

• londons_explore 5y ago
  There needs to be some kind of "pay for delay" scheme. If a federal agency takes 2 years to make a decision because they're really worried about getting sued for making the wrong decision, they should have to pay for the fact the decision took so long. That way they can trade off speed of decisions vs quality of decisions.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • shortstuffsushi 5y ago
    The problem with "pay for delay" for government agencies is that it is passed on to the taxpayers. The FAA won't go out of business or face any "bailouts" as such, it will simply result in a higher cost to taxpayers. ETA: Additionally, I don't believe any members of the FAA are elected, although possibly some are appointed by elected officials? Point being - taxpayers pay more, taxpayers get angry, taxpayers can't vote people causing them out of office for their inaction, FAA continues to do nothing
    • deleted 5y ago
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    • lmeyerov 5y ago
      These programs are ultimately run by people.. So you can force them out (hard), or second-best, give their fiefdom to others and mar their record to prevent them for future big projects.
      • shortstuffsushi 5y ago
        Who would have the power to force them out? I guess potentially the elected officials perhaps, which I was mentioning with the appointments bit. It's something for sure, but it's a step removed from the people footing the bill being able to do something about it
        • lmeyerov 5y ago
          Part of why forcing gov employees out is hard is you have to go through hurdles like showing severe measurable underperforming, think lowest-quartile, which can be tricky, onerous, and little reward. That's why I quickly drift more towards killing their incentives, which in turn is effectively controlled by annual congressional budgets and what parts they get. Then again, when the average US senator is generally disconnected from what's happening, controlling via the budget has its own challenges...
    • pas 5y ago
      The Administrator is appointed for a 5year term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Administration#History_of_FAA_Administrators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Administratio... Sure, taxpayers pay ultimately, but that's not the important part. The important part is that taxpayers currently don't care. They don't really have a stake in this. They are indifferent, because they don't feel the huge torrent of opportunity cost of a slow regulatory agency going down the drain. Pay for delay would make this visible. It'd immediately help to put pressure on politicians, and that will make the executive branch much much much more responsive to these issues.
      • shortstuffsushi 5y ago
        Hmm, I get what you're saying, but it sounds like an "attention tax" at that point, which seems like an unsustainable approach -- assuming voters even realized that these additional fines existed and were coming out of their taxes, the gist of this seems to be, if you want to stop people who aren't doing their job correctly, fine another group (citizens), who will then contact a third group (legislators) to do something about the first group. This same could be expanded to seemingly any part of the government moving to slowly, but at what point do citizens say "hey we're tired of paying for you all not doing your job, and why are we only finding out about it by being fined?"
        • pas 5y ago
          While certainly the taxpayers pay it ultimately, the function is to compensate those who take up the struggle with bureaucracy. And yes, I think it would be good to put more concrete dollar numbers next to these lengthy processes. It would help legibility by making consequences clear(er) plus if there's a slight compounding by time,then it incentivizes resolutions. (Instead of the current system where applicants basically have one recourse, which is trying to sue the government.)
  • nradov 5y ago
    Federal agencies generally have complete legal immunity for their decisions. Concerns over getting sued are not the reason for delays.
    • EricE 5y ago
      That's not entirely true - agencies get sued and loose lawsuits all the time. It would be accurate to say that while most people working for government don't have immunity, it's pretty rare for them to get affected personally* so effectively it is immunity. Lack of oversight and accountability is the real reason for delays. They get away with it because no one holds them accountable for actually producing something in a timely manner. *I wish I could find it - there is an example of some government employees who were held personally liable for some environmental violations - despite them complaining to upper management that they needed to be addressed. Was pretty f'd up. I think they were civilian employees in the military (for some reason I'm thinking Air Force but can't dig it up at the moment). So if you are low enough on the totem pole your but may get in a sling - but it's amazing how little the upper echelons seem to take hits.
      • netizen-936824 5y ago
        One cannot "loose" a lawsuit, but they can "lose"
  • thatguy0900 5y ago
    Is there a way to charge government agency's in a way that accomplishes anything? If the faa is fined it will just be paid by the taxpayer, it's not like they have a revenue stream to worry about. And if you charge them enough to make it hard to do their job with their budget then that is just counter productive?
    • EricE 5y ago
      Don't charge. Your thinking in normal terms. They don't care about charges or fines because they don't create money in the first place. If you want to hit a government agency where it hurts, cut their budget by the amount you would fine someone else. That is about the only thing that will get their attention!
      • thatguy0900 5y ago
        I mean, the faa has no competition. If they are already incompetent and you cut their budget, won't they just be more incompetent? Is there any examples of a government agency reforming itself under budget cuts to be more effective? It doesn't sound plausible to me
        • alan-hn 5y ago
          Sounds like we should change the way we hire people in government to increase competency
          • thatguy0900 5y ago
            I would go as far as saying there should be a elite govt branch that has the power to dissolve and reform all these anemic regulatory bodies like they do with police forces every once in a while. That should be congress but good luck getting them to do anything, they should be on the chopping block too. I think anyone who's actually competent probably just gets frustrated and leaves
            • 5y ago
  • EricE 5y ago
    "they should have to pay" - who is "they" in your postulation? Government doesn't create anything; it's funded by confiscation of wealth from its citizens (also known by the cuter and more acceptable term: taxation). Now if you want to tweak it to their budget should get cut the longer they take to make a decision - that's something government agencies would *actually* pay attention to. About the only thing, actually. The executive branch only ignores congress because congress refuses to do their job. They have the power of the purse but are loathe to use it. The 17th amendment was an utter disaster enabling the morass we are now in.
• EricE 5y ago
  • beecafe 5y ago
    If the private sector was in control we would still have leaded petrol in cars.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      And cigarette ads on TV, designed for children, etc.
    • pas 5y ago
      Was the private sector really in control though? - asks the libertarian devil's advocate. On one hand, "yeah prohibiting bad things is good, duh", on the other hand bad policies prevents building affordable walkable high density neighborhoods, providing cheaper medical care, providing certain services like hair braiding, and so on. There's an optimal path in this. No need to resort to absurd counterfactuals. The root of the problem is that society and the people themselves are inconsistent. Their stated preferences don't match their actual preferences revealed through their actions. (Of course a big part of that is simply the bounds on human rationality. We are easily misled by our own biases, naive, exploited through emotional pressure, gullible, etc. Plus on top of all this we have problems with consuming the relevant information sources, filtering and processing the firehose of the Internet.) There's no consistent preference from society for tolerating this and this amount of risks and harms in exchange for cheaper gas. Most people don't even think of these as a complex interconnected inseparable thing. They just want to "ban lead" or have a "small government" and so on. The public-private separation makes sense in some contexts, but the line is not clear, and when it comes to politics there's almost no separation. It's about equity and oppression. History is full of examples of shifting preferences and increased equity and decreased oppression. (Monarchies, slavery, universal suffrage, gay marriage ... society as a whole changed its mind about these. [Yes, of course, there are reactionaries all the time, and there's no universal law that says that these changes can't be reversed or never will change back somehow.]) It's not about public or private, it's about who benefits and who gets exploited. Both the "everything is publicly owned and controlled" Stalinist USSR (and Maoist China) and the privately owned United Fruit (and both the Dutch and the British East India companies) committed crimes against humanity on an unimaginable scale (all while "democracy was booming" in both the Dutch and British societies.)
• FL410 5y ago
  Totally. Meanwhile China throws caution to the wind and innovates like we used to. The most important line of this article doesn't even pertain to aviation directly: > Some perspective: In 1957, the U.S. hadn’t even launched a satellite. Twelve years later, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. So unleaded avgas is a harder problem than a lunar landing? Perhaps you can enlighten me in the comments section. It's happening everywhere, all industries. This infatuation with impeding progress in the name of organizational justification, budget numbers, or whatever - it'll be the death of us if we don't get it under control.
  • alan-hn 5y ago
    There's a whole lot of conservatism driving it. I'm not talking about the political ideology, I'm talking about the basic idea of conserving the same way of doing things "because that's what we've always done" or "it was good enough for our grandparents" or "why change what isn't broken" None of these things are good excuses to keep beating the same dead horse, that's not how progress is made. I also know that changing too many things at once can lead to issues so I'm not advocating for upending everything at once, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't start changing what needs to be changed. Perhaps this is just my perspective and we may not agree where that start lies.
    • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      This conservatism of which you speak is just risk intolerance, or less charitably, an unwillingness to accept responsibility. We're stuck with old processes, byzantine committe review for simple things, expensive PE stamped drawings for a storm drain, all because nobody is willing to give it a try and be responsible for the result. And we actively crap on anyone who does want to give it a try as being reckless. Risk intolerance, diffusion of responsibly, things like that as an abstract concepts tends to thunderous applause around here. So maybe a mirror would help us solve the problem.
      • pas 5y ago
        bias toward short term risk avoidance versus long term risk avoidance. (hence status quo bias, also "nobody got fired for buying IBM", etc.) what's needed is a meta-level risk budget and sane risk management, and in case of conservative industries (medicine, aviation, nuclear, blablabla) there should be a calculated and constant push to bias against stagnation, without fucking up the otherwise great safety record. (of course this usually means a bit more in costs of managing changes, but that should be looked at in the perspective of opportunity costs of not changing to better processes/technology/structure/etc.)
• indymike 5y ago
  This is normal, except when we get into a real war.
• systemvoltage 5y ago
  But HN's first reaction to any discomfort or unfairness is legislation. There are so many threads where the top comment is frothing with legislation demands.