Editor’s Note: This article is Part 3 in our series, “The War on Facts: How Political Interference Threatens Core Democratic Institutions.” Read the Series Overview, Part 1: Science and Statistics Under Siege, Part 2: The Memory Wars, Part 4: The Information Warfare Ecosystem, and Part 5: Defending Democracy’s Infrastructure.
Introduction: When Politics Trumps Public Safety
On January 5, 2024, Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 suffered an in-flight separation of the left mid-exit door plug and a rapid depressurization while climbing through about 14,830 feet out of Portland. 177 people were on board. Only the quick actions of the flight crew prevented catastrophe. The incident was not an act of nature or unforeseeable accident—it was the predictable result of regulatory capture, where the agency meant to protect the public had been systematically undermined by the very industry it was supposed to oversee.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had allowed Boeing to essentially police itself through a program called “Organization Designation Authorization,” where company employees were given authority to approve their own safety systems. The result was a culture where production schedules and profit margins took precedence over passenger safety. In its final report, the NTSB found the probable cause was Boeing’s failure to provide adequate training, guidance, and oversight for factory rework that led to missing bolts; the Board also faulted the FAA’s ineffective oversight of Boeing’s systemic nonconformance issues.
This is regulatory independence under siege—and Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 represents just one front in a broader war being waged against the safety state. Across federal agencies tasked with protecting public health and safety, a similar pattern is emerging: political appointees overruling career experts, industry influence corrupting decision-making processes, and regulatory frameworks designed to protect Americans being systematically dismantled.
Welcome to Part 3 of “The War on Facts,” where we examine how the destruction of regulatory independence doesn’t just threaten abstract principles of governance—it threatens your family’s safety when you board an airplane, trust that your medications are safe and effective, and assume that the air you breathe and water you drink meet basic health standards.
The Regulatory State Under Fire
Regulatory agencies occupy a unique position in American democracy. Unlike congressional representatives who must appeal to voters every two years, or presidents who face election every four, regulatory agencies are designed to operate with a degree of independence that allows career experts to make decisions based on science and evidence rather than political expediency.
This independence isn’t absolute—agencies answer to political appointees and ultimately to elected officials. But the system historically maintained crucial boundaries: career scientists and safety experts were insulated from direct political pressure when evaluating whether a drug was safe, whether air pollution limits needed strengthening, or whether an aircraft design met safety standards.
Those boundaries are now crumbling across multiple fronts simultaneously, creating unprecedented threats to public safety.
The FDA: When Drug Approval Becomes Political Theater
The Food and Drug Administration represents perhaps the most critical front in this battle. Every day, millions of Americans trust that the medications they take, the food they eat, and the medical devices keeping them alive have been evaluated by independent experts using rigorous scientific standards. That trust is being systematically eroded.
The Prasad Firing: Political Interference in Vaccine Regulation
Politico reported that President Trump personally overruled both Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary to fire Dr. Vinay Prasad, the government’s top vaccine regulator, on July 30, 2025. The firing came despite both Kennedy and Makary raising concerns about the decision—marking an unprecedented level of direct presidential interference in vaccine regulation.
Prasad’s dismissal wasn’t based on professional incompetence or ethical violations. Instead, sources told Politico that Trump was responding to pressure from conservative commentators who viewed Prasad as insufficiently aligned with the administration’s vaccine skepticism agenda. The message was clear: even career scientists with sterling credentials would be fired if their professional judgments conflicted with political objectives.
The AI Hallucination Scandal: Technology Without Oversight
Meanwhile, the FDA’s embrace of artificial intelligence has created new opportunities for political manipulation. In July 2025, the agency launched “Elsa,” an AI tool designed to revolutionize drug and medical device approvals. But as CNN investigations revealed, career staff told reporters the FDA’s internal AI assistant Elsa has hallucinated nonexistent studies and lacks access to key documents; it is not used for formal regulatory determinations.
Career FDA employees told CNN that the AI couldn’t access key documents necessary for proper drug evaluation, yet agency leadership continued promoting the technology as a breakthrough innovation. The pattern was troubling: political appointees pushing unproven technology while career staff raised safety concerns that were systematically ignored.
The Revolving Door Spins Faster
Perhaps most revealing was the July 2025 appointment of George Tidmarsh, a veteran pharmaceutical industry executive, as the FDA’s top drug regulator. Tidmarsh’s career exemplified the “revolving door” between industry and government that RFK Jr. had specifically promised to shut down. Yet his appointment proceeded anyway, highlighting the gap between political rhetoric about regulatory capture and the reality of continued industry influence.
As Bloomberg Law noted, the appointment “underscores the challenge in closing a ‘revolving door’ between the industry and government that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised to slam shut.” The contradiction wasn’t accidental—it reflected the fundamental impossibility of maintaining industry expertise while eliminating industry influence.
The EPA: Environmental Protection as Political Football
The Environmental Protection Agency faces an even more direct assault on its scientific independence. Under Administrator Lee Zeldin, the agency has begun systematically dismantling the regulatory frameworks that protect air and water quality, responding more to political directives than environmental evidence.
Climate Science Under Attack
On July 29, 2025, the EPA proposed revoking the “endangerment finding”—the scientific determination that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare that has served as the legal foundation for all federal climate action since 2009. The proposed revocation wasn’t based on new scientific evidence; atmospheric CO2 levels continue rising, and climate impacts continue intensifying. Instead, it represented a purely political decision to eliminate the regulatory basis for climate protection.
The timing was particularly revealing. The announcement came during a summer of record-breaking heat waves, devastating wildfires, and extreme weather events that underscored the urgency of climate action. Yet the administration moved forward with eliminating climate regulations anyway, demonstrating how political ideology can override even the most compelling scientific evidence.
Research Eliminated, Scientists Silenced
Even more dramatically, EPA eliminated its scientific research arm. Multiple outlets (WaPo/AP/PBS/LA Times) report ORD’s dissolution and a large RIF beginning July 18–19, 2025. This office had “produced the science underpinning regulations on everything from PFAS to pesticides to lead” for decades. Eliminating it didn’t just reduce the agency’s research capacity—it eliminated the internal scientific expertise needed to evaluate industry claims and develop evidence-based regulations.
As environmental policy expert Joel Schwartz observed, “This EPA research office safeguarded Americans’ health. Trump just eliminated it.” The decision represented a deliberate choice to remove scientific expertise from environmental decision-making, leaving the agency dependent on industry-funded research and political appointee judgment.
Grant Programs Terminated
The assault extended beyond regulatory rollbacks to active destruction of environmental programs. On August 5, 2025, the EPA moved to cancel $7 billion in grants for solar energy programs that had already been approved under the Biden administration, according to NYT, with Reuters and WaPo corroborating the move. The cancellation wasn’t based on performance problems or fraud—these were functioning programs with documented environmental benefits. Instead, they were terminated purely because they represented the previous administration’s priorities.
The pattern was clear: environmental protection agencies were being systematically stripped of the tools, expertise, and legal authority needed to protect public health, regardless of the scientific evidence supporting their work.
The FAA: Aviation Safety in Political Turbulence
Aviation regulation presents perhaps the starkest example of how regulatory capture can literally put lives at risk. The Federal Aviation Administration’s relationship with Boeing in the 737 MAX crisis revealed how industry influence could corrupt the most fundamental safety decisions.
Self-Regulation Gone Wrong
The 737 MAX disasters—Lion Air Flight 610 in October 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 in March 2019, killing 346 people combined—resulted directly from the FAA’s delegation model (ODA) that reduced direct FAA visibility and contributed to misunderstandings about MCAS during certification, according to DOT OIG reports. Through the Organization Designation Authorization (ODA) program, Boeing employees were given authority to approve safety-critical systems on behalf of the FAA.
The arrangement created obvious conflicts of interest. Boeing engineers faced pressure to approve designs quickly to meet production schedules, while also being responsible for ensuring those same designs met safety standards. The predictable result was the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS)—a flight control system that could override pilot inputs without adequate training or even pilot awareness of its existence.
Production Over Safety
Even after the Alaska Airlines door plug incident in January 2024, the FAA’s response revealed how deeply industry influence had penetrated aviation regulation. After grounding affected MAX 9s for inspections, the FAA imposed a 38-per-month production cap that remains in place as of late July 2025, demonstrating ongoing safety concerns rather than confidence in Boeing’s quality control systems.
By July 24, 2025, Reuters reported the FAA said Boeing had not yet asked to remove the production cap and that the agency would review the supply chain first. This nuance strengthens the point that the cap remains in place, but Boeing was already positioning to seek its removal.
The Trump Administration’s Response
Perhaps most troubling, The Verge reported in July 2025 that “the Trump administration won’t pursue the harshest penalties against Boeing for the 737 MAX crashes. Instead, the company will be allowed to regulate itself.” Despite clear evidence that self-regulation had failed catastrophically, the political response was to double down on the same failed approach.
This represented regulatory capture in its purest form: an industry that had demonstrably failed to police itself being granted even greater authority to do so, purely because of political considerations that prioritized business interests over passenger safety.
Case Study: The Convergence of Capture—RFK Jr.’s Contradictions
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tenure as Health Secretary illustrates how regulatory capture can operate even under the banner of fighting it. Kennedy built his political brand on opposing “regulatory capture” by pharmaceutical companies, promising to clean house at health agencies corrupted by industry influence.
Yet his actual record reveals the complex ways political interference can masquerade as reform:
Fighting One Industry, Empowering Another
While Kennedy criticized pharmaceutical influence over the FDA, he simultaneously pushed policies that would benefit the dietary supplement industry—part of the $6.3 trillion global wellness economy in which Kennedy and other “Make America Healthy Again” figures had extensive financial ties. The dietary supplements segment represents approximately $180–200 billion of this broader market. As KFF Health News reported, Kennedy “lambasted federal agencies he accused of being overly influenced by the pharmaceutical industry. But he and other ‘Make America Healthy Again’ notables have their own financial ties to the vast and largely unregulated” wellness industry.
Kennedy’s war on FDA food additive regulations, framed as protecting public health, would primarily benefit supplement manufacturers who faced fewer regulatory requirements than traditional food companies. The “anti-capture” rhetoric masked policies that would actually increase industry influence over regulatory decisions.
Eliminating Scientific Expertise
Kennedy’s approach to fighting capture often involved eliminating the career scientists and regulatory experts who could provide independent judgment. On Feb 14, 2025, the administration moved to terminate ~5,200 probationary HHS employees (including about 1,300 at CDC), according to AP and Federal News Network reporting, part of a broader federal workforce reduction. The mass firing didn’t target industry-aligned officials—it eliminated career employees whose scientific expertise could challenge political directives.
This pattern appeared across multiple agencies: rather than strengthening independent scientific review, the “anti-capture” agenda systematically weakened the institutional capacity for independent judgment that could resist both industry and political pressure.
The Global Context: Learning from Democratic Backsliding
The American experience fits a broader international pattern of regulatory capture during democratic backsliding. Authoritarian movements consistently target regulatory agencies because these institutions serve as crucial checks on both political and economic power.
Hungary’s Environmental Capture
In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s government systematically captured environmental agencies by appointing industry-friendly officials and eliminating inconvenient scientific expertise. Environmental impact assessments became pro forma exercises, and pollution monitoring was scaled back in favor of business-friendly policies. The result was increased environmental degradation alongside the enrichment of politically connected industries.
Brazil’s Scientific Suppression
Under Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil fired the head of the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) after the agency published data showing accelerating Amazon deforestation. The pattern was familiar: career scientists producing inconvenient facts were replaced by political appointees more willing to accommodate industry preferences.
The Authoritarian Playbook
Across cases, the authoritarian approach to regulatory capture follows predictable steps:
- Discredit expertise: Cast career scientists and regulators as biased or corrupt
- Install loyalists: Replace independent experts with political appointees
- Eliminate capacity: Cut budgets, eliminate offices, fire staff
- Change standards: Rewrite rules to favor political or industry preferences
- Control information: Limit data collection and suppress inconvenient findings
The United States is following this playbook with disturbing precision across multiple agencies simultaneously.
The Real-World Consequences: When Regulation Fails
The stakes in this battle extend far beyond Washington politics. Regulatory failure has concrete, measurable impacts on public health and safety.
Aviation Disasters
The 737 MAX crashes killed 346 people and grounded an entire aircraft model for nearly two years. The regulatory failures that enabled these tragedies imposed massive economic costs across the aviation industry, with effects rippling through airlines worldwide and raising fundamental questions about aircraft certification processes.
Environmental Health Impacts
The EPA’s regulatory rollbacks directly threaten public health. Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that air pollution contributes to more than 100,000 American deaths annually, while MIT studies suggest the figure could reach 200,000.* Weakening pollution standards doesn’t just create abstract policy problems—it increases asthma rates in children, raises cardiovascular disease risk in adults, and shortens life expectancy in affected communities.
The Economic Costs of Regulatory Failure
Regulatory capture doesn’t just threaten safety—it imposes enormous economic costs that fall disproportionately on ordinary Americans.
Healthcare Costs
When the FDA approves ineffective drugs or fails to catch safety problems early, the costs multiply throughout the healthcare system. Patients suffer unnecessary side effects, doctors waste time on treatments that don’t work, and insurance companies (ultimately ratepayers) pay for expensive therapies with little benefit.
The opioid crisis provides a devastating example. FDA approval of OxyContin in 1995 relied heavily on Purdue Pharma’s own safety data, with insufficient independent review. The resulting epidemic killed over 600,000 Americans and cost the economy an estimated $1 trillion in healthcare costs, lost productivity, and social services.
Environmental Cleanup Costs
Weak environmental regulation creates massive future cleanup costs that ultimately fall on taxpayers. The Superfund program has identified over 1,700 sites requiring environmental remediation, with cleanup costs often exceeding billions per site. Many of these sites resulted from regulatory failures that allowed pollution to continue unchecked until remediation became far more expensive than prevention would have been.
Market Uncertainty
Contrary to industry claims, regulatory capture often increases rather than reduces economic uncertainty. When regulations change based on political winds rather than scientific evidence, businesses cannot predict future requirements or invest accordingly. The result is boom-bust cycles that create instability for both industry and consumers.
Defending Regulatory Independence: Institutional Reforms
Protecting regulatory independence requires both immediate political action and longer-term institutional reforms that can survive changes in political control.
Structural Independence
Some agencies, like the Federal Reserve, enjoy greater independence through structural protections: board members serve fixed terms that span multiple administrations, and they can only be removed “for cause” rather than political disagreements. Similar protections could be extended to safety-critical agencies like the FDA and FAA.
Scientific Integrity Protections
Career scientists need stronger protections against political retaliation. The Scientific Integrity Act, proposed in Congress, would create formal channels for scientists to report political interference and establish independent review processes for scientific disputes. These protections need teeth—including reinstatement rights and financial compensation for wrongfully terminated experts.
Transparency Requirements
Public disclosure of industry meetings, financial ties, and decision-making processes can help expose inappropriate influence. The FDA already publishes some meeting records, but these requirements need strengthening and standardization across agencies.
Independent Funding
Many regulatory agencies depend on industry fees for funding, creating inherent conflicts of interest. The FDA receives significant funding from pharmaceutical companies through user fees, while the FAA gets revenue from airline fees. Alternative funding mechanisms could reduce industry leverage over regulatory decisions.
The Choice Point: Independence or Capture
American democracy faces a fundamental choice about the role of expertise in governance. One path leads toward regulatory agencies staffed by career professionals making decisions based on scientific evidence and established procedures. The other leads toward agencies controlled by political appointees making decisions based on ideology, campaign contributions, and industry pressure.
The difference isn’t academic. When regulatory agencies lose independence, people die—in plane crashes, from contaminated drugs, and from polluted air and water. The institutions under attack weren’t created to obstruct business or empower bureaucrats. They were created because unregulated markets consistently failed to protect public health and safety.
The COVID-19 pandemic offered a stark reminder of why independent scientific expertise matters. Countries with strong, independent public health agencies generally responded more effectively than those where political considerations overrode scientific judgment. The difference measured in millions of lives and trillions of dollars in economic impact.
Conclusion: The Safety Net Under Strain
The regulatory agencies under political assault form America’s safety net—the institutions that stand between citizens and the various ways modern life can kill them. When the FAA maintains aircraft safety standards, the FDA keeps dangerous drugs off the market, and the EPA limits toxic pollution, these agencies aren’t imposing bureaucratic burdens. They’re preventing disasters.
The current assault on regulatory independence represents something unprecedented in American history: a systematic attempt to dismantle the safety state during a period when technological complexity makes independent expertise more necessary than ever. Modern aircraft, pharmaceuticals, and industrial processes require specialized knowledge that political appointees typically lack.
Yet the assault continues, driven by an ideology that views all government regulation as illegitimate regardless of its public health benefits. The result is a dangerous experiment: Can a complex technological society function without independent institutions to ensure that profit-seeking doesn’t override safety considerations?
The early results are troubling. Aircraft door plugs blow out, ineffective drugs reach market, and environmental protections disappear just as climate change makes them more crucial. These aren’t isolated incidents—they’re symptoms of a broader breakdown in the institutional arrangements that have protected American lives for generations.
Rebuilding regulatory independence will require more than changing political leadership. It will require renewed commitment to the principle that some decisions—particularly those involving life and death—should be made by experts using scientific evidence rather than politicians responding to campaign contributors.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. When regulatory agencies lose their independence, the consequences aren’t just policy failures—they’re human tragedies that could have been prevented if scientific expertise had been allowed to override political expediency.
In a complex world filled with invisible dangers, regulatory independence isn’t a bureaucratic nicety—it’s a matter of survival.
Coming up in Part 4: The Information Warfare Ecosystem—How alternative “knowledge” networks are replacing traditional fact-based institutions and manufacturing consent through manufactured reality.
References
- National Transportation Safety Board. “In-flight structural failure, Alaska Airlines Flight 1282.” NTSB Investigation Report, 2025. https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Pages/DCA24MA063.aspx
- National Transportation Safety Board. “Boeing’s Inadequate ‘Training, Guidance and Oversight’ Led to Alaska Airlines 1282 Door Plug Failure.” Press Release, June 24, 2025. https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20250624.aspx
- Office of Inspector General. “Weaknesses in FAA’s Certification and Delegation Processes Hindered Its Oversight of the 737 MAX 8.” February 23, 2021. https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/FAA%20Certification%20of%20737%20MAX%20Boeing%20II%20Final%20Report%5E2-23-2021.pdf
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