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Comment by elmerfud | Hacker News Reader

Allowing your personal crusade against a person to impact your regulatory duties as a government official should land you in jail. Because what you're doing in your regulatory oversight position should be regulatory oversight of the issue not trying to impend on someone's freedom of speech.

Try and set your ego aside and just do your job. This kind of attitude you have right here where you think the FAA should punish somebody's opinions is what makes the phrase "drain the swamp so popular". Literally unelected bureaucrats should be doing their job and not trying to control the speech of others.

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Biden held an EV summit in 2021 and didn't invite Tesla. He declared GM's Mary Barra as the pioneer of EVs when GM had only manufactured 28 EVs that quarter and Tesla sold hundreds of thousands that were all manufactured in the US. The WSJ recently reported that it was because the UAW donated heavily to his campaign.

I do see a bit of a difference between a summit organized by an elected official and bureaucrats in unelected positions exerting personal influence. At some level when we elect someone we elect them based upon how they will exercise their discretionary authority. The role of the president isn't simply to carry out process. There is discretion and how they execute the duties of their office and holding a summit as in your example is one of those things. The recourse here is that is an elected official and if the people are unhappy with how they're executing that discretionary duties they simply elect another person.

When you're talking about a bureaucratic lifer at some agency who is supposed to implement regulations and regulatory oversight that Congress has enacted that's a completely different thing. What recourse do the people have if this non-elected bureaucrat is not acting in an impartial way when they execute their duties?

I think the difference is that the president doesn't hold a regulatory role. Like, he isn't supposed to be "impartial", he's inherently political in a way that civil servants shouldn't be (not openly, and not in a way that affects their jobs).

Wasn't it a UAW EV summit? Or was it an event organized by executive power? Because if it was organized by executive power, i find it baffling. If it was organized by the Union like i just read, and they invited Biden who accepted, i find it weird but quite normal, and the rest is just outrage bait and whining.

It was an EV event organized by executive power, Tesla wasn't invited because a major political donor to the presidential campaign, the UAW, didn't want Tesla there.

More details from the WSJ.

https://archive.md/856RL

Well, in that case this is dumb. And I don't think a president should organize any event that's not related to foreign policy.

The UAW is why Elon wasn't there, but the summit certainly was not organized (directly) by them.

> Allowing your personal crusade against a person to impact your regulatory duties as a government official should land you in jail. Because what you're doing in your regulatory oversight position should be regulatory oversight of the issue not trying to impend on someone's freedom of speech.

If you're just 5% slower at answering requests to people you dislike in favor of people you like, imagine how much this weighs down a person in aggregate across all actors and decision makers in the state space. This wouldn't even have to be a conscious bias here, it could be a completely subconscious preference.

I agree that there can be unconscious bias and how you execute things. This is something that should be relatively easy to control for. When performing at your duties the assignment should be handed out in an impartial fashion you have a stack first in first out. You can simply measure the time to completion and the deviation. This should give you a good enough metric to know to look if there is potentially a deeper issues happening. It could be reviews from SpaceX take longer because the technology is different or is rapidly changing or a host of other factors. Once you know the actual metrics is when you can start to examine if it's bias conscious or subconscious or just the nature of the request.

The op was indicating an actual conscious bias that they indicated would cause them to institute delays which is where the real problem comes down to.

> Allowing your personal crusade against a person to impact your regulatory duties as a government official should land you in jail.

Considering the state goal of the Republican platform is “to rid itself of the woke mind virus” and to hire only conservative loyalists, I’m not sure how popular your idea would be.

What if the scenario is the other way around? What if they've been cutting corners for SpaceX because they appreciate the work that they're doing but now they're not because they don't like the way Elon Musk is behaving towards their organization or others?

In my mind the same would apply. When you're in an unelected position meant to be exercising some sort of regulatory oversight you should do your job with neutrality toward the person who's requesting it.

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