They're not the same thing, no. But that doesn't change the fact that stuffing the FAA with Boeing insiders is a dumb idea.

anyone who looks at my comments on Boeing knows I’m fairly critical. However, it’s probably fair to say anyone with any bonafides in commercial aviation by definition is a Boeing insider since it has either squashed or acquired all of its domestic competition. We talk all the time about banks are too big to fail yet when it comes to defense we simultaneously create projects that only Boeing can bid and look the other way when Boeing acquires companies that might represent an alternative while increasingly taking delivery of weapons systems that don’t work as intended. One doesn’t have to look that deep into history to see scandals like the Air Force tanker which rose all the way to the Supreme Court, or the failed SLS project which has sent so much pork spending to specific congressional districts that Spacex could build something like 300 falcon 9’s instead, to see that Boeing’s relationship with the US government is problematic at its very core. Blaming both parties is surface level equivocation that does nothing. The simple fact is Boeing is too big, they know it and the government knows it and unless we want our defense to be outsourced to foreign ownership, preserving this status quo is quite literally the only thing keeping Boeing from reverse-mergering itself out of this country. We have overlooked our own strategic resources - be it pharmaceutical, manufacturing, telecom, etc, for far too long and have pursued incredibly near-sighted policy objectives to our own detriment. In the spirit of HN, I’ve already gotten too political here but I will say one final thing: don’t equivocate both parties as equal, neither should you be complacent and assume what your party is telling you is the right direction either — there’s more to this issue than simply saying oh let’s arm the regulators with more regulations and vice versa.

> there’s more to this issue than simply saying oh let’s arm the regulators with more regulations and vice versa.

If it is, there’s no support for that claim in anything written in the message I reply to.

They should be rules against stuff like that. Our current head of Health and Human Services is a former pharmaceutical lobbyist...there are more examples...