Anyone old enough knows this is flows from 1980s Reagan deregulation policies. Now these same people (literally the same people, in some cases) are trying to blame the government for it. The government (FAA) is nominally at fault, but the reason they are at fault is exactly what you said - they could not get funding to do their job and relied on industry to self-regulate.

Save taxpayer dollars with fewer inspectors! Less burden on industry! Win-win! :-(

As I've mentioned elsewhere, more self-inspection at packing plants, combined with higher line speeds "for worker safety," is why I recently went vegetarian.

I can very faintly understand the reaction when Boeing was so successful. It just exemplify that no institution should rest on laurels and there should be mandatory external pressure and chaos monkey like systems to restore doubts.

They have chaos monkey like systems all over the place when designing and building commercial aircraft.

They perform tons of analyses like FMEA on their processes, their designs, then they have tons of SimIL/SIL/HIL testing partially derived from those analyses to verify their safety case, and at almost every layer of the development lifecycle they do tons of fault-injection oriented verification.

The MCAS system went through an amount of rigor that dwarfs anything applied to typical software or IT infrastructure, but the issue persisted due to fundamental underestimation of risk associated with this kind of failure and a confusingly terrible design & implementation from a functional-safety and human factors perspective.

Thanks for the reminder, but I meant at a higher spot in the organization, clearly the FAA lacked verification, that's where I meant to add more.