Why not? The decision first comes from management, but engineers are the ones who implement it.

I think things would change pretty quick if engineers responded to such requests with "I can't do that, because my professional association would remove me from their membership, which would revoke my license to write software in this country at all".

That's how (AIUI) law, medicine, (real) engineering, etc., work today.

Unless you've got a legal/regulatory structure to enforce it, it can't work. And there is absolutely no will on the part of corporations or Congress to do such a thing as it runs contrary to their interests. Even if it were feasible, software development is one of the easiest things to jurisdiction shop since it can be done anywhere. So unless you further mandate where the development must be done, it still won't work.

Keep in mind that most law/medicine/engineering work has some local component anchoring it to local laws. (i.e. currently, someone typically needs to be 'boots on the ground' in the jurisdiction to provide the service) Software doesn't have that.

(edit: obviously, this is a U.S.-specific view of the situation. Other countries may not have the same issues)

What about an organization which

1) Maintains a membership list 2) Maintains a list of software which is signed off on by members 3) Browser/OS/etc utilities which refuse and/or warn when trying to run software not in the registry 4) Member expulsion if registered software is found to be nefarious

This is basically the system Apple/Microsoft/Debian/etc/etc already use for official software distribution. We just need the organization to move out of their walled gardens.

The big leak here is users which have to use resources they don't control. I can imagine an IaaS company which won't run software unless its in the registry, and then companies can boast that your data is 'safe' (or at least not nefarious) because they run in this kind of environment.

“I can’t prescribe you this drug because it’s more expensive than the generic one ... despite their sponsoring me and my family to their annual conference in the Bahamas.”

“I can’t recommend this additional procedure for you despite it making me $8500 in a day.”

Regulation doesn’t seem to influence for profit medicine much.

How about also give citizens unrestricted access to their medical files through an online platform (possibly government maintained or possibly insurance maintained, or possibly self-maintained see below...)?

The whole conversation is logged or perhaps converted speech2text as they discuss, and both patient and doctor sign each statement they make. Then both doctor and patient have a copy of their interaction.

Any poor advice is now provable to a third party (say court).

How about replacing profit as a primary motivation in healthcare with... care?

You are complicit if your moral compass allows you to create software that challenges fundamental human rights without pushing back or taking a stand.