Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/01/27/boeing-lobbied-to-weaken-safety-regulations.html
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It’s sort of a pity there’s no domestic competi…
Oh yeah, thanks Reagan.
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Sorry, early AM memories of working aviation.
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Reminder that the Supreme Court majority is primed and raring to soon overturn the “Chevron Doctrine”, which will result in federal agencies (like, say, the FAA,) having vastly reduced authority over the industries they regulate, and limits them to the specificity and directives of only the laws that Congress passes (like, here, the ‘experts’ Cantwell & Estes.)
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? Boeing and McDonnell Douglas merged in 1997 during the Clinton Administration. And by many accounts, that is when the business majors took over from the engineers and began the process of crappification that has seriously crapified the company. But I don’t think that had much to do with the federal government per se. (although some think that McDD reliance on defense contracts were in part responsible for the non-engineering corporate culture that infected Boeing)
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In 2018, a failure of the Boeing 737 Max anti-ice system caused the plane to crash. Following this incident, Boeing asked for exemptions from safety regulations regarding the anti-ice systems. The Foundation for Aviation Safety vehemently urged Boeing not to allow the exemptions,
I am not familiar with this incident, I think it might be conflating the two MCAS-caused crashes in 2018 with the FAA safety warning issued August 2023 for the Max de-icing system (which hasn’t caused a crash as far as I know!)
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Thats what it sounds like to me too.
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Before Reagan, that merger would have never happened, don’t lose the forest for a particularly gnarly tree…
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As if competitors today would not be lobbying separately (if not in concert) for fewer regulations and lower standards and/or finding other ways to extend regulatory capture. The capitalist zetgeist has moved on from stakeholders and ‘good business’ to ‘minimise costs, extract maximum profits, keep delivering short-term rewards to shareholders no matter what’
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Yes however, giving them control over the one handbrake the government held certainly didn’t impede this process,
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Limiting Chevron isn’t entirely a bad thing. As it stands, an agency can interpret the law one way, and then interpret it the opposite way with no intervening change in the law as enacted. This means that things that were legal can spontaneously become illegal and always have been illegal.
The duty of the president (and through him, the rest of the executive branch) to “faithfully execute” the laws would seem to imply broad (but not infinitely broad) authority to interpret those laws. Congress can always limit the scope of interpretation by writing more specific laws, but that comes with its own problems. personally, I’m not familiar enough with all the case law to have an informed opinion on whether Chevron falls within the scope of that authority.
But it really doesn’t work like this. Regulations are encoded in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). The interpretation of those regulations are discussed in the Federal Register every time a new regulation is promulgated, or a regulation is changed.
When a new regulation is proposed, or a change proposed, the Federal Agency is required to publish in the register and make generally open for comments from the general public. It will then review those comments and respond to them, making changes to the regulation as appropriate. Once finalized, the regulation will be published, and a period granted for affected industries to conform their operations before the regulations come into effect.
This process is what prevented the Trump administration from instituting many damaging changes — they ignored the process so egregiously that even a sympathetic Supreme Court had to strike them down.
A Federal agency can’t just reinterpret a rule differently on a whim. Individual employees may not understand the rules (I get this a lot in my work) or may go rogue (happens, but those employees don’t last long in oversight positions), but generally someone in the agency will correct them and industry groups will work on providing training to their members on the common understanding of the regulations. A President may propose interpretive changes, but those changes are slow, transparent, generally incremental, and follow the process above.
For example, fuel economy standard have been changing over decades, with vehicles becoming increasingly more efficient. Often those changes are popular — people like paying less for gas — and so the industry was moving in that direction anyway. Sometimes they are unpopular, such as the phaseout of incandescent lightbulbs, but it stimulates an industry to change, with the ultimate result being popular, or at least not reviled, such as energy efficient LED lightbulbs that have almost the same visual light properties as incandescents while requiring a fraction of the operating costs.
What the challenge to Chevron is about is an industry not liking the fact that an agency provides oversight and limits their ability to absolutely squeeze every penny of profit out of their activities, consequences such as the collapse of a fishery and extinction of the very herring they are fishing be damned.
Overturning Chevron will result in massive harm to the people of the US. The Roberts court is trying its damnedest to make the Taney court (of the infamous Dred Scott decision) look like it was being run by Kumbaya singing hippies.
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@MagicFox explained it very well but I want to emphasize that this
Is not how it works. At all. It’s why the federal register exists. Every major law interpretation has to go thru the rules process, which takes minimum of one year. Absolutely minimum of one year. Most of the time 2 or 3. Even very minor policy changes that don’t have to do with interpreting a law take 6 months at best. Closer to a year or two. Every agency has rules that require certain processes and analysis happen before doing even something as simple as changing a form.
This idea that the federal agencies can just change things at the drop of a hat is corrosive and originates entirely with GOP talking points.
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Don’t buy Chinese, Russian, or American planes, unless you are a chancer trying to save some dollars.
Hasn’t this always been the wider global consensus?
In 2018, a failure of the Boeing 737 Max anti-ice system caused the plane to crash.
Wait, what? The 737MAX anti-ice system has its issues but I don’t think it has ever caused any incidents.
The Foundation for Aviation Safety vehemently urged Boeing not to allow the exemptions…
I presume you mean, urged the FAA to not allow the exemptions…
And then a month later, a door blew off mid flight.
Which is bad, yes, but that was a manufacturing error. Even without the anti-ice issue or the issues that caused the MAX crashes, that door would still have blown off.
This BoingBoing post makes it sound like fixing any one of these things (the anti-ice issue, the lobbying about the anti-ice issue, the door incident, and the causes of the 2018 accidents) would have fixed the others, but I don’t see how that’s true.
Read “Flying Blind” by Peter Robison. He details Boeing’s transition from an engineering-led company to a management-led company; how cost cutting and stock price came to dominate every decision the company made. From sweetheart deals with the FAA allowing Boeing to do their own safety reviews to refusing to train pilots on new features (ie - 737 MAX) to save on costs.
Yes, that’s how “expertise” works within industries, as technologies and practices change and evolve, and stats and experience are gained and integrated. You’re making the case for agencies being the authorities, being nimbler and capable of evolving their stances without requiring Congress to react/update/act (which is nigh-impossible).
Thank you and @MagicFox for having so much more patience than I to explain the process that evolved with Chevron so well & succinctly. It adds a healthy dose of realism to my point that agencies are far more “nimble” in their reactive regulation promulgations - it’s of course on a relative “government action” scale: it takes a careful and public and industry-involved 6 months to a year for agencies to update regs, as opposed to a full-scale congressional bill–>law, which are quite rare (and even rarer today.)
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When a new regulation is proposed, or a change proposed, the Federal Agency is required to publish in the register and make generally open for comments from the general public. It will then review those comments and respond to them, making changes to the regulation as appropriate. Once finalized, the regulation will be published, and a period granted for affected industries to conform their operations before the regulations come into effect.
Yes, but, the agency is free to not make any changes to the proposed rule, even if the comments are: “the proposed rule contradicts the letter of the law”, and the period granted doesn’t necessarily allow grandfathering of ownership of now illegalized items, though the items were legal to own before.
It interacts very badly with the Rule of Lenity, as some of the ambiguity claimed affects criminal law, which by the Rule of Lenity should result in the resolution being towards the defendant, but instead, because the agency says they have a regulation that clarifies the ambiguity, deference is given to the government instead.
Overturning Chevron doesn’t mean that agencies can’t perform regulation. But they do need to be more explicitly given that power to make the regulations. Chevron nominally has a two-part test, but the first (whether the statute is ambiguous at all) is frequently skipped over in actual application, and the ambiguity is assumed, as if there were no ambiguity, then there would be no need for the rule. From the case at SCOTUS now: “We need not decide whether we classify this conclusion as a product of Chevron step one or step two.” But that is exactly what the Chevron test requires. You can’t get to step two until you’ve done step one.
Yes, the petitioners are self-interested in not spending money on the observers required, but few petitioners are not self-interested.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. The law is the statutes that Congress has enacted. It’s not the at the drop of the hat, but it’s not requiring a democratic process to change, but rather a bureaucratic process. And if I’m relying on an interpretation of the law, I should be able to lobby my congresscritters on the change of the law, rather than hoping the regulator agrees with my comment, or having to sue them over their new interpretation, where they may even have explicitly previously claimed that the new interpretation would not comply with the existing statutory language.
