I think I understand. Is there a reasoning why there is no local oversight?
I get the small town argument. But here in Europe small towns fall under the jurisdiction of larger towns. How could this be considered "federal overstepping"?
Because just about anything is considered federal overreach in much of the US. Remember, this country was founded on resistance to a far-off authority. The south got a "booster shot" of anti-federal-government sentiment with the civil war, and still haven't gotten over it 170 years later. We even had a president (Reagan) who explicitly sowed distrust of the very federal government he headed, and that was during my adult lifetime. Whole books have been written about the quintessentially American distrust of any government beyond the horizon, so I could hardly do it justice here, but I will note that it's a key part of every other political debate we have.
I've spent most of my life in "commonwealth" states (PA, MA, VA), which (legend has it) are founded on a similar principle: the local governments can do what they want unless the state explicitly decides it's a state-level responsibility.
It's supposed to be a bottom-up structure, where middle tiers (Counties) are more a pooling of resources for the towns than a middle-manager for the State. There's often lots of "regional councils" or associations rather than "branch offices" of state agencies you'd see in a top-down structure. There may also be a County-level government with more or less power, depending on the state and specific topic.
They often have jurisdictional lines that reflect their pooling of grant-writing resources rather than simple geographic regions (like FEMAs) [1,2]. In the absence of statewide guidelines, these organizations often set the standards (often because the state can't or won't).
That is, the intermediate jurisdiction is often a voluntary collaboration - usually among the more progressive/better-funded townships/departments - and it's often the small-town departments that don't participate in these councils that have this "leave us alone" attitude and especially lax standards.
[1] https://www.shacog.com/SystemImages/SHACOGCommunities.png
[2] http://www.nemlec.com/img/NEMLEC-mapcompress.png