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What makes you feel the OTA wouldn't similarly fall victim to cronyism and lobbying? Soon enough your head of OTA would just be another corporate flunky like any other agency.

This is a result of structural issues with our government, it's not as if adding yet another office will magically change that fact.

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It depends on the mandate provided to the agency.

Regulators at the federal level have be de-fanged because of the increasing reactionary forces controlling pursestrings in Congress. It became obvious with OSHA and now even the FAA is a wimp in the face of pressure from Boeing. That's part of a strategy by certain people who want to erode trust in government.

It's possible to structure things in a way that limits politicalization.

Part of it's the result of extreme centralization and integration of industry, too. If no individual companies work across the entire scope of what a given agency or department regulates, and if there are many such companies rather than just a few, it's harder to draw a straight line between a given regulation and direct benefit to every single one of your potential employers when you rotate back out into the private sector. Would still happen, but it'd be harder to get a small group of industry insiders to agree on how regulation should look, easing regulatory capture at least a bit, and maybe a lot.

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