Congress doesn’t give a damn. If they did they would take care to see that public safety is what counts, not the pocketbooks of Boeing and themselves.

After crashes, probers are looking into FAA’s role in crisis

Four weeks before a Lion Air jet plunged into the Java Sea in October, Congress passed provisions that gave the plane's maker, Boeing, even more power to oversee itself.
It was another win in Boeing's long-running campaign to get the federal government to delegate more of the Federal Aviation Administration's safety responsibilities to the company, but it also was a reflection of the difficulties of having a government workforce oversee the design and production of some of the world's most sophisticated machines.

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Boeing reported spending $15 million lobbying Congress, the FAA and other federal agencies last year, and it has hired outside lobbyists to push the oversight delegation issue, according to disclosures filed with the Senate.

The provisions were part of a broader FAA funding and disaster relief bill, which passed by wide margins and was signed by President Donald Trump in October. The law gives private firms more power over the rule books describing what role the FAA has in approving designs.

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After being directed by Congress, the FAA set up the certification system, known as the Organization Designation Authorization program, in 2005. It delegates power to a company unit inside Boeing that is supposed to do much of the detailed, technical legwork involved with finding whether a company is complying with safety standards.

Proponents of the system said the FAA was understaffed and too slow to issue approvals of new planes, hampering economic growth. Boeing pays the workers, which the company said numbered 1,000 employees in 2015.

The then-chief executive officer of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Ray Conner, defended the system before Congress that year, putting particular emphasis on the argument that the FAA should further cede control to Boeing in areas that are not as important for safety, such as for airplane "seats, lavatories, galleys," bemoaning the "inordinate amount of time spent sometimes on seat certifications, on interior certifications."

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"Government regulation too often, in the name of protecting the public, makes us less competitive -- and actually does very little to protect the public," said Rep. Tom Rice, R-S.C., who thanked Conner "for American excellence in aviation, and for employing so many thousands of the people in South Carolina."

Rice added that Boeing has a "vested interest" in safety, because "if we sacrifice safety in American aviation, then we won't be competitive in that area very long."

https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2019/mar/25/congress-gave-boeing-its-powe...