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Comment by mattkrause | Hacker News Reader

The current administration has certainly done some damage but:

- the NIH is one of the biggest drivers of biomedical research in the world, both in terms of extramural funding and intramural research. The NSF, NASA, and the research arms of the DoD and DoE (etc) are also world-class.

- Hurricane Dorian nonsense aside, the weather and ocean forecasts from NOAA/NWS are well-regarded.

- the FAA and FDA have kept flying, food, and medicine quite safe.

- The National Parks System is fantastic and the USGS maps are quite good; maybe only the UK’s OS maps are better regarded.

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The FDA blocked private testing at a critical point early in the coronavirus. The FDA keeps many lifesaving treatments out of the US, at a large and unseen cost. For example, the FDA blocked UVB sunscreens for a decade after they were permitted in Europe. Those extra US skin cancer deaths are "unseen" but are casualties of the FDA. In turn, the FAA allowed Boeing to "self-regulate" approvals of the MAX and after the first plane went down, still deemed it to be airworthy.

US institutions have a huge issue with regulatory capture

Regulatory capture is profiteering off something other that value added.

Which US institutions are profiting?

Boeing was, making profits selling unsafe planes.

ISPs are probably the big bugbear. Constantly ranked as one of the worst industries by consumers, competition doesn't exist in many markets or is noncompetitive, and mergers have slowly brought back the edifice of Ma Bell back from the dead.

There’s a revolving door system where you can make laws to benefit an incumbent large company and conveniently end up as a board member in a few years after quitting the government role.

So while the 3 letter agencies don’t profit directly, sometimes the people do.

Anything involving risk and trade-offs is tough to evaluate.

The FDA might be too slow to approve approve new sunscreens, but they also dragged their feet on approving thalidomide, a decision that turned out to be absolutely correct in hindsight.

The FDA's overall reputation seems pretty good. Daniel Carpenter's book calls it "the most powerful regulatory agency in the world." This article talks about its (very positive) reputation as well: https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.23.1....

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