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Comment by shortstuffsushi | Hacker News Reader

The problem with "pay for delay" for government agencies is that it is passed on to the taxpayers. The FAA won't go out of business or face any "bailouts" as such, it will simply result in a higher cost to taxpayers.

ETA: Additionally, I don't believe any members of the FAA are elected, although possibly some are appointed by elected officials? Point being - taxpayers pay more, taxpayers get angry, taxpayers can't vote people causing them out of office for their inaction, FAA continues to do nothing

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These programs are ultimately run by people.. So you can force them out (hard), or second-best, give their fiefdom to others and mar their record to prevent them for future big projects.

Who would have the power to force them out? I guess potentially the elected officials perhaps, which I was mentioning with the appointments bit. It's something for sure, but it's a step removed from the people footing the bill being able to do something about it

Part of why forcing gov employees out is hard is you have to go through hurdles like showing severe measurable underperforming, think lowest-quartile, which can be tricky, onerous, and little reward. That's why I quickly drift more towards killing their incentives, which in turn is effectively controlled by annual congressional budgets and what parts they get.

Then again, when the average US senator is generally disconnected from what's happening, controlling via the budget has its own challenges...

The Administrator is appointed for a 5year term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Administratio...

Sure, taxpayers pay ultimately, but that's not the important part. The important part is that taxpayers currently don't care. They don't really have a stake in this. They are indifferent, because they don't feel the huge torrent of opportunity cost of a slow regulatory agency going down the drain. Pay for delay would make this visible. It'd immediately help to put pressure on politicians, and that will make the executive branch much much much more responsive to these issues.

Hmm, I get what you're saying, but it sounds like an "attention tax" at that point, which seems like an unsustainable approach -- assuming voters even realized that these additional fines existed and were coming out of their taxes, the gist of this seems to be, if you want to stop people who aren't doing their job correctly, fine another group (citizens), who will then contact a third group (legislators) to do something about the first group. This same could be expanded to seemingly any part of the government moving to slowly, but at what point do citizens say "hey we're tired of paying for you all not doing your job, and why are we only finding out about it by being fined?"

While certainly the taxpayers pay it ultimately, the function is to compensate those who take up the struggle with bureaucracy.

And yes, I think it would be good to put more concrete dollar numbers next to these lengthy processes. It would help legibility by making consequences clear(er) plus if there's a slight compounding by time,then it incentivizes resolutions. (Instead of the current system where applicants basically have one recourse, which is trying to sue the government.)

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