It really broke the spell that America could fuck around in the rest of the world without finding out.

It seems like there are two problems:

1. No one wants to be the person who rolls back regulations, because they’ll be blamed the next time something goes wrong.

Even if the previous regulation wouldn’t have stopped it (again, TSA internal tests of people getting knives and guns through), that person is getting blamed.

2. There is simply a ton of money in this crap. Those companies have lobbyists and donate to campaigns.

Given (1), these congresspeople aren’t going to change it anyway so I don’t actually think corruption plays as much into it. They’d never vote to remove the regulations; campaign donations are free money.

Engineering orgs have similar problems. I remember at Stripe seeing the 12 years of accumulated processes. Every bug or incident needed a new process or automated checker to ensure it couldn’t ever happen again. None of these were ever reviewed or removed.

As an EM, even if I knew something was a net-negative when comparing dev velocity vs. risk x magnitude of a bug, no chance my manager would let me remove it.

It takes confident, independent leadership willing to make tough trade-offs to change these things. That’s pretty rare in my experience.