Hacker News Reader

Regardless of how incompetent they are. Incompetence should not be the benchmark for which terms like "Reasonable Burden" are applied against.

View on HN

Each part of the government tends to give a great deal of deference to the other parts of the government.

This reminds me of when I worked on a public policy project for a biotech company. Our product didn't fit in the current Medicare policies, so we decided to approach Medicare and suggest a solution.

Medicare spent months just digging into the laws and talking to their lawyers just to prove they actually had the jurisdiction to change the policy. That really blew me away. One of their bigger concerns was "this might not be our job".

CMS, as a regulatory agency, does have a high priority in making sure it’s got the legal right to make regulations pertaining to a thing. Because otherwise those regs are illegal, which causes lawsuits and chaos.

You make it sound like they spent months trying to finagle a way out of working.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com