I think this is pretty consistent with the old school 1950s views of the current administration. Companies can prioritize profits over people again. Yeah, dump in the rivers, dump in the woods, just drive around in circles dumping in an empty lot. You don’t need masks- give everyone cancer and blow some shit up, maybe get some acid burns. Super-fund sites? When was the last one we had anyway- we need more of ‘em- lots more! Let’s let the kids eat the lead paint and complain of the smells wafting into their cars from the chemical, paper, etc. plants on road trips, just like the olden days!
> I think this is pretty consistent with the old school 1950s views of the current administration.
The effects are functionally the same, but I think the ideology and rhetoric behind then and now have changed.
There really isn't a purportedly "principled" system of logic behind these decisions, in the past these decisions would be dressed in principled rhetoric no matter how heinous they realistically were.
They aren't even bothering to dress it up in rhetoric that says there is something noble behind these decisions.
Hmmm, 1950s attitudes, hmm. What if we consider the hypothesis that the animus towards the CSB is for the absolute stupidest reasons possible? Here are the 3 current CSB board members [1-3].
In the mid-twentieth century corporate management's focus was more broad:
> This view was shared not only by scholars but, surprisingly, by many corporate executives. In 1949 General Foods’ president Clarence Francis told Congress that he had a “three-way responsibility to the American consumer, to our associates in this business, and to the 68,000 [stockholders in General Foods]. We . . . would serve (the company’s) interests badly by shifting the fruits of the enterprise too heavily toward any one of those groups.” Two years later, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey claimed that managers needed “to conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups—stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” So widespread were such views that, in 1959, one writer in the Harvard Business Review complained that it was no longer “fashionable for the corporation to take gleeful pride in making money.” Instead, he complained, it was typical “for the corporation to show that it is a great innovator; more specifically, a great public benefactor; and, very particularly, that it exists ‘to serve the public’.”
> Even the law bent, at least a bit, toward this “social” view of corporate purpose. When the New Jersey Supreme Court upheld corporate charitable donations in its 1956 A.P. Smith Manufacturing Co. decision, it rested its judgment less on any benefit that would accrue to the company than on the belief that corporations had responsibilities beyond those owed to shareholders; corporations needed, the court held, to “acknowledge and discharge social as well as private responsibilities as members of the communities within which they operate.”
The fact that people do not know this history, and think that corporation and capitalism was 'always' about only making money, limits the options under discussions for fixing some of the social ills we are experiencing currently. Yes: corporations need to (at least) break even to survive, and ideally have some sort of return, but there are degrees to which they have to push to accomplish this.
Some of the highest levels of economic growth (and its distribution to all) was done during times when shareholder primacy was not the main goal—though there were other factors, which may or may not be replicable, that helped with that growth:
You have to check out their incredible safety investigation videos on youtube. I don't know how well-organized or efficient they are but clearly their role needs to be played by someone - and as a taxpayer I appreciate that they are doing it in a way that educates and informs.
> The President’s Budget proposes $0 for CSB’s FY 2026 budget with the expectation that CSB begins closing down during FY 2025. CSB’s emergency fund of $844,145 will be appropriated to cover costs associated with closing down the agency. Exact closing costs will be determined upon consultation with OMB and Congress.
Definitely worth watching! No matter if you’re technical or not. Top notch productions, beautiful even.
I think a huge, huge amount of the government is wasteful but the CSB is doing incredible work. Some of the smartest chemical engineers go on to work there later in their career. Due to the average age of the knowledge-holders, this isn’t an agency that you can shut down and easily restart. Young engineers don’t make good investigators - you need a super keen sense of industry to walk into a place where you don’t know anyone and put all the clues together correctly.
The CSB produces very neutral but incredibly detailed reports. Please note that the CSB is not an enforcement agency - they don’t assign fault or levee fines or bring any charges or write any regulation.
All they do is figure out why every major industrial disaster occurred and communicate that to other companies so that they have the know-how to prevent if from happening again if they so choose. The CSB’s reports are invaluable to the operations of so many companies and plants.
Some of the top comments on a 1-year old video with 3.5 million views:
> I can't believe that a government agency makes some of my favorite YouTube videos. I've been watching these for years now
> Finally, a good use of my taxes
> I work in the petrochemical industry, with polymerizable substances that are quite similar to butadiene. The findings hit home. I will share this video tomorrow with all my colleagues in the plant management, who I am sure will appreciate it.
> An amazing service, thank you. When I worked at a copper mine in Yukon I would always replay your videos when it was my turn to give the safety brief and they were ALWAYS well received. Your videos save lives
> USCSB is the only US government agency I have subscription notifications on for. You all have done fantastic work for these 25 years.
> CONGRATULATIONS on 25 years to the CSB! A quarter century of excellence in safety education and investigations. I have learned so much about industrial processes and the safety measures utilized (sometimes not successfully) by industry thanks to the brilliant videos produced by the CSB. Thank you for your hard work, CSB!
> This is hands down the most positive comment section on YouTube. I, and everyone else it seems, love this channel. I’ve learned so much
> Thank you CSB for all that you do. As an engineer and new supervisor at a production facility, I utilize your videos all the time to help teach the operators the dangers that we have lurking. You improve and save lives all over due to your work. Please, keep it up.
> Love the analysis and insights to these industrial disasters that the USCSB provides. Hope you stay well funded to continue commissioning these mini documentaries.
boring and/or utterly fascinating, depending on the viewer -- safety engineering, whether that's airplanes, submarines, chemical plants, or whatever, is totally fascinating. Making something work is difficult, making it work safely, even more so.
I think we will soon have to confront serious, real world proof that an unregulated free market is not ultimately self-regulating. Control systems without upper bounds (e.g. shareholder value / profit maximization) are prone to feedback loops and oscillations. And an oscillating system cannot be judged in its entirety during an upward cycle alone (20th century).
Going one level of abstraction higher: there is no evidence that demand/supply dynamics alone will regulate a society over larger populations and time scales. Even the phrase "invisible hand" appears only once in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, somewhere around page 500, and that refers not to the market at large, but to the emergence of protectionist behaviours among suppliers within a country.
Laws and regulations are part of the free market system. As rules approach zero, competition approaches war.
We already have real-world proof of this which is why regulations were slowly (and bloodily) introduced in the first place.
It's the same tragedy of the commons we see with vaccinations. Vaccinations work, so we then forget why we had them in the first place, so then we think "well... what if we just stop?"
I love the USCSB videos and in couple incidents I likely protected myself and others from an accident due to risk awareness I had as a result of their videos. (e.g. most recently the realization that few micron tungsten powder might be significantly pyrophoric at elevated temperature-- which it is).
I'm also a fan of their written reports, which are much more informative than the videos but less well known.
But contrary to other posters here I'm less convinced that it's so obviously cost effective: $14.4 million dollars a year isn't much compared to the staggering waste in other federal programs. But it certainly sounds like a lot compared to only investigating 180 incidents over 27 years-- 6 incidents a year (which is also the figure for 2022 so it's not just a product of a slow ramp though some years have less or more).
So it's something like more than a million dollars an incident which seems not so efficient.
It's also a small enough scale that it ought to be pretty reasonable to fund it through the industries directly.
That said, OSHA's budget is more like $700 million a year... and I'd rather see CSB's funding just come out of that. If public money is to be spent supporting industries, I'd rather more go to investigations and education than on a regulatory empire.
I hope someone is keeping a list of all these crazy rollbacks so the next democrat administration (assuming there is one dun-dun-dun etc) can be held accountable for not rolling back the rollbacks.
Even if they do I'm worried that this kind of sabotage of progress will become the new norm, with each subsequent administration undoing everything the previous one did as standard, and going even further to appease the extremists.
I know this has always happened to some degree with executive orders (the was a great tradition of presidents signing all sorts of crazy stuff just so the next guy would have to undo it and look bad) but it seems nuclear now (sometimes literally)
It is highly surprising that the narrative in the US has morphed the expenses on public institutions of enormous importance, into wastage, something that has to be cut or eliminated.
Why is it that no one is pointing out the contribution of these institutions to the US and the world?
The US, has a society, has grown so materialistic, that they fail to see anything beyond money.
Somethings cannot be measured by money. In fact, when it comes to public governance, money is the least useful thing.
Nothing surprising there. The US-led social media finally achived its biggest success. It made weaponized ignorance viable at an enormous scale.
Not just in the US but all over the world. The fight now is anybody with some critical thought ability vs willfully and violently ignorant. The former is getting fewer in the numbers and the latter is out for blood. We need to be very efficient to disarm and passivize the violent ignorants otherwise they will slowly kill us and the humanity.
It isn't the narrative. It's what a small band of institutional hackers want to do to the country. If anything the narrative is to not care about anything.
Admittedly, I'd never heard of the CSB until this article but their mission - from their "About Us" page - seems important:
"The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating chemical incidents to determine the cause or probable cause."
Out of curiosity, I looked up the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment in 2023 and can't find their investigation on their site in either the active or completed investigation sections. Looking elsewhere, I'm only finding FEMA's concerns about cancer clusters, nothing from the CSB. Can anyone else find it?
Only if you assume the respective movements can be taken at face value. If this and MAHA are actually for the purpose of destroying functional things, in the manner that missile strikes are for destroying functional things, then none of this is at odds with anything else: the purpose is just more aligned with the result than with the claimed intentions.
I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't actually save any money or make anyone much more money. It's just a result of mindlessly fetishizing the past and misattributing past periods of rapid industrial growth to lack of regulation. The real cause was rapid population growth at the time, war, and extremely rapid adoption of bedrock industrial age technologies like electricity.
Today we have a fully deployed modern infrastructure and slow to negative population growth. Cutting regulation won't change that.
It's always a matter of time before a facility explodes for preventable reasons and costs the company billions in property damage and lawsuits. This decision to stop learning from mistakes and spreading awareness will hurt profits in the long run, not make more money. It'll also be harder to find people willing to work around chemicals if they can't trust the safety measures.
The article mentions redundancy but doesn't specify what organization is claimed to make CSB redundant. I'm guessing it's the NIH since, to be fair, Vance announced an investigation into the East Palestine chemical spill five days ago: https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/nih-long-term-health-research...
The people in charge KNOW what the CSB does, that's why they want it gone
The CSB makes it known how much your employer is willing to kill you over saving like ten bucks.
Chemistry industry executives don't like that.
Do you HONESTLY believe that these people who have spent the past 60 years crying about how much the EPA makes their business "harder" (literally 1% more expensive) don't know exactly how the EPA protects the public from them?
They don't care that their actions literally kill people. They don't care.
Dupont did not care at all that they were dumping PFOAs that they confirmed were acutely and chronically toxic to mammals upstream of a small town's drinking water.
They do not care. Executives don't make money for caring.
We're getting reset to modern Europe: there is no equivalent to the US CSB in any major European country. France's BEA-RI is not independent, and the CSB is not EPA or OSHA. I'm always amazed how little commenters know about the US, and deeply saddened by how much less they know about others.
There's simply no balancing the budget without both raising taxes and cutting social services.
We should, of course, be efficient with our money. Any dollar we can save is a good thing but until I hear someone talk about raising taxes and cutting social spending I'm not going to take serious the idea that we're trying to balance the budget.
I would leave the funding as long as they make MORE videos than one a year. With all the AI tools coming out they should be able to produce much fantastic content. I can't count the number of times I've referred our site EHS managers throughout the years to their Youtube.
Or, I guess, cut the funding, and next Dupont or Deridder or Bhopal, we will just shrug and hope the company responsible for the incident is transparent and forthcoming in their internal investigation /s
It's pretty important for anyone working around chemicals. I work around truck racks and pump houses and giant fuel tanks all day, and I'm rather glad I don't need to worry about being blown 100 feet in the air in an explosion and leave my family behind like my great uncle did. The reason I don't worry is because, partly due to the CSB, we're pretty good at knowing how to work around explosive liquids safely.
Everyone gets hung up on money and they don't pay attention to value. The CSB annual budget is less than some of the contracts I work on, automating fuel farms on military bases. They're good value for money.
When something happens, the real cause of the problem is often due to a combination of the entity (the company/person/whatever that had the "something" happen), as well as external factors. Those external factors can include rules/guidance—or the lack of rules/guidance—from multiple agencies.
If a regulatory agency is also doing investigations, they may choose to focus less on their own 'failings' (that is, their agency's rules/guidance or lack of rules/guidance), and focus more on others' failings. Or, they may choose to focus less on other agencies' failings for political reasons.
Having a third party, with no regulatory ability, helps to reduce the appearance of bias, and increase trust in the industry that the third party investigates.
drjolly|8 months ago
heavyset_go|8 months ago
The effects are functionally the same, but I think the ideology and rhetoric behind then and now have changed.
There really isn't a purportedly "principled" system of logic behind these decisions, in the past these decisions would be dressed in principled rhetoric no matter how heinous they realistically were.
They aren't even bothering to dress it up in rhetoric that says there is something noble behind these decisions.
nerdsniper|8 months ago
> Please note that the CSB is not an enforcement agency - they don’t assign fault or levee fines or bring any charges or write any regulation.
12_throw_away|8 months ago
Hmmm, 1950s attitudes, hmm. What if we consider the hypothesis that the animus towards the CSB is for the absolute stupidest reasons possible? Here are the 3 current CSB board members [1-3].
[1] https://www.csb.gov/members/board-member-catherine-sandoval-...
[2] https://www.csb.gov/members/board-member-sylvia-e-johnson-ph...
[3] https://www.csb.gov/members/board-member-steve-owens-/
rurban|8 months ago
spacecadet|8 months ago
throw0101c|8 months ago
This is not from the 1950s, but from the 1970s, most famously (though others piled on after Friedman's (in)famous NYT letter):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
In the mid-twentieth century corporate management's focus was more broad:
> This view was shared not only by scholars but, surprisingly, by many corporate executives. In 1949 General Foods’ president Clarence Francis told Congress that he had a “three-way responsibility to the American consumer, to our associates in this business, and to the 68,000 [stockholders in General Foods]. We . . . would serve (the company’s) interests badly by shifting the fruits of the enterprise too heavily toward any one of those groups.” Two years later, the president of Standard Oil of New Jersey claimed that managers needed “to conduct the affairs of the enterprise in such a way as to maintain an equitable and working balance among the claims of the various directly interested groups—stockholders, employees, customers, and the public at large.” So widespread were such views that, in 1959, one writer in the Harvard Business Review complained that it was no longer “fashionable for the corporation to take gleeful pride in making money.” Instead, he complained, it was typical “for the corporation to show that it is a great innovator; more specifically, a great public benefactor; and, very particularly, that it exists ‘to serve the public’.”
> Even the law bent, at least a bit, toward this “social” view of corporate purpose. When the New Jersey Supreme Court upheld corporate charitable donations in its 1956 A.P. Smith Manufacturing Co. decision, it rested its judgment less on any benefit that would accrue to the company than on the belief that corporations had responsibilities beyond those owed to shareholders; corporations needed, the court held, to “acknowledge and discharge social as well as private responsibilities as members of the communities within which they operate.”
* https://www2.law.temple.edu/10q/purpose-corporation-brief-hi...
The fact that people do not know this history, and think that corporation and capitalism was 'always' about only making money, limits the options under discussions for fixing some of the social ills we are experiencing currently. Yes: corporations need to (at least) break even to survive, and ideally have some sort of return, but there are degrees to which they have to push to accomplish this.
* https://beatricecherrier.wordpress.com/2025/06/18/beyond-pro...
Some of the highest levels of economic growth (and its distribution to all) was done during times when shareholder primacy was not the main goal—though there were other factors, which may or may not be replicable, that helped with that growth:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_American_...
absurdo|8 months ago
[deleted]
userbinator|8 months ago
vpribish|8 months ago
andrewflnr|8 months ago
jonahx|8 months ago
I can't think of another use of my tax dollars that I get as much direct pleasure from.
Hawxy|8 months ago
They're 50 employees with an annual budget of $14.4 million. The cost/benefit ratio here is very good.
q3k|8 months ago
> The President’s Budget proposes $0 for CSB’s FY 2026 budget with the expectation that CSB begins closing down during FY 2025. CSB’s emergency fund of $844,145 will be appropriated to cover costs associated with closing down the agency. Exact closing costs will be determined upon consultation with OMB and Congress.
Source: https://www.csb.gov/assets/1/6/csb_cj_2026.pdf
andrekandre|8 months ago
https://themortgagepoint.com/2025/06/23/senate-parliamentari...
hecanjog|8 months ago
z991|8 months ago
nerdsniper|8 months ago
I think a huge, huge amount of the government is wasteful but the CSB is doing incredible work. Some of the smartest chemical engineers go on to work there later in their career. Due to the average age of the knowledge-holders, this isn’t an agency that you can shut down and easily restart. Young engineers don’t make good investigators - you need a super keen sense of industry to walk into a place where you don’t know anyone and put all the clues together correctly.
The CSB produces very neutral but incredibly detailed reports. Please note that the CSB is not an enforcement agency - they don’t assign fault or levee fines or bring any charges or write any regulation.
All they do is figure out why every major industrial disaster occurred and communicate that to other companies so that they have the know-how to prevent if from happening again if they so choose. The CSB’s reports are invaluable to the operations of so many companies and plants.
Some of the top comments on a 1-year old video with 3.5 million views:
> I can't believe that a government agency makes some of my favorite YouTube videos. I've been watching these for years now
> Finally, a good use of my taxes
> I work in the petrochemical industry, with polymerizable substances that are quite similar to butadiene. The findings hit home. I will share this video tomorrow with all my colleagues in the plant management, who I am sure will appreciate it.
> An amazing service, thank you. When I worked at a copper mine in Yukon I would always replay your videos when it was my turn to give the safety brief and they were ALWAYS well received. Your videos save lives
> USCSB is the only US government agency I have subscription notifications on for. You all have done fantastic work for these 25 years.
> CONGRATULATIONS on 25 years to the CSB! A quarter century of excellence in safety education and investigations. I have learned so much about industrial processes and the safety measures utilized (sometimes not successfully) by industry thanks to the brilliant videos produced by the CSB. Thank you for your hard work, CSB!
> This is hands down the most positive comment section on YouTube. I, and everyone else it seems, love this channel. I’ve learned so much
> Thank you CSB for all that you do. As an engineer and new supervisor at a production facility, I utilize your videos all the time to help teach the operators the dangers that we have lurking. You improve and save lives all over due to your work. Please, keep it up.
> Love the analysis and insights to these industrial disasters that the USCSB provides. Hope you stay well funded to continue commissioning these mini documentaries.
PostOnce|8 months ago
hliyan|8 months ago
Going one level of abstraction higher: there is no evidence that demand/supply dynamics alone will regulate a society over larger populations and time scales. Even the phrase "invisible hand" appears only once in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, somewhere around page 500, and that refers not to the market at large, but to the emergence of protectionist behaviours among suppliers within a country.
Laws and regulations are part of the free market system. As rules approach zero, competition approaches war.
ourmandave|8 months ago
I thought we've known since well before the 1952 Cuyahoga River fire that sparked the formation of the EPA.
Although TBF, there's never been a lot of demand for literal burning rivers.
const_cast|8 months ago
It's the same tragedy of the commons we see with vaccinations. Vaccinations work, so we then forget why we had them in the first place, so then we think "well... what if we just stop?"
nullc|8 months ago
I'm also a fan of their written reports, which are much more informative than the videos but less well known.
But contrary to other posters here I'm less convinced that it's so obviously cost effective: $14.4 million dollars a year isn't much compared to the staggering waste in other federal programs. But it certainly sounds like a lot compared to only investigating 180 incidents over 27 years-- 6 incidents a year (which is also the figure for 2022 so it's not just a product of a slow ramp though some years have less or more).
So it's something like more than a million dollars an incident which seems not so efficient.
It's also a small enough scale that it ought to be pretty reasonable to fund it through the industries directly.
That said, OSHA's budget is more like $700 million a year... and I'd rather see CSB's funding just come out of that. If public money is to be spent supporting industries, I'd rather more go to investigations and education than on a regulatory empire.
Arubis|8 months ago
JackYoustra|8 months ago
Waiting for all of the people who said that doge would lead to increased efficiency (or at the very least a smaller deficit) to say they're wrong.
nopelynopington|8 months ago
Even if they do I'm worried that this kind of sabotage of progress will become the new norm, with each subsequent administration undoing everything the previous one did as standard, and going even further to appease the extremists.
I know this has always happened to some degree with executive orders (the was a great tradition of presidents signing all sorts of crazy stuff just so the next guy would have to undo it and look bad) but it seems nuclear now (sometimes literally)
jmye|8 months ago
kumarvvr|8 months ago
Why is it that no one is pointing out the contribution of these institutions to the US and the world?
The US, has a society, has grown so materialistic, that they fail to see anything beyond money.
Somethings cannot be measured by money. In fact, when it comes to public governance, money is the least useful thing.
okanat|8 months ago
Not just in the US but all over the world. The fight now is anybody with some critical thought ability vs willfully and violently ignorant. The former is getting fewer in the numbers and the latter is out for blood. We need to be very efficient to disarm and passivize the violent ignorants otherwise they will slowly kill us and the humanity.
dboreham|8 months ago
It isn't the narrative. It's what a small band of institutional hackers want to do to the country. If anything the narrative is to not care about anything.
monkeyelite|8 months ago
And which society are you contrasting this with?
bravesoul2|8 months ago
I can only assume Trump administration is incompetent, corrupt and negligent.
gottorf|8 months ago
A case of the baby getting thrown out with the bathwater, I suppose. And make no mistake: there was enough dirty bathwater to go around.
desperate|8 months ago
caseysoftware|8 months ago
"The CSB is an independent federal agency charged with investigating chemical incidents to determine the cause or probable cause."
Out of curiosity, I looked up the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment in 2023 and can't find their investigation on their site in either the active or completed investigation sections. Looking elsewhere, I'm only finding FEMA's concerns about cancer clusters, nothing from the CSB. Can anyone else find it?
KindOne|8 months ago
CSB is for manufacturing / processing incidents.
dehrmann|8 months ago
Applejinx|8 months ago
pixl97|8 months ago
Increase safety?: X
Make more money?: YES
The USCSB makes life safer for everyone in this country, especially people that work around potentially dangerous chemicals and pressurized equipment.
api|8 months ago
Today we have a fully deployed modern infrastructure and slow to negative population growth. Cutting regulation won't change that.
randerson|8 months ago
yongjik|8 months ago
dboreham|8 months ago
Applejinx|8 months ago
juancampa|8 months ago
jimbohn|8 months ago
mrguyorama|8 months ago
The people in charge KNOW what the CSB does, that's why they want it gone
The CSB makes it known how much your employer is willing to kill you over saving like ten bucks.
Chemistry industry executives don't like that.
Do you HONESTLY believe that these people who have spent the past 60 years crying about how much the EPA makes their business "harder" (literally 1% more expensive) don't know exactly how the EPA protects the public from them?
They don't care that their actions literally kill people. They don't care.
Dupont did not care at all that they were dumping PFOAs that they confirmed were acutely and chronically toxic to mammals upstream of a small town's drinking water.
They do not care. Executives don't make money for caring.
pif|8 months ago
Keyword: "independent".
They investigate before talking. They narrate the fact instead of reading the official narrative. Those pesky wokes must go.
meepmorp|8 months ago
monkeyelite|8 months ago
flanked-evergl|8 months ago
[deleted]
2Gkashmiri|8 months ago
The United states of america MAGA movement wants to compete with taliban in turning their countries 500 or even 900 years back.
Who will win? Not really sure. Its a touch and go situation and it can turn any either way and emerge as the winner
esbranson|8 months ago
r0ckarong|8 months ago
smeeger|8 months ago
charcircuit|8 months ago
CSMastermind|8 months ago
We should, of course, be efficient with our money. Any dollar we can save is a good thing but until I hear someone talk about raising taxes and cutting social spending I'm not going to take serious the idea that we're trying to balance the budget.
wvenable|8 months ago
cosmicgadget|8 months ago
pjc50|8 months ago
const_cast|8 months ago
sciencesama|8 months ago
doka_smoka|8 months ago
Or, I guess, cut the funding, and next Dupont or Deridder or Bhopal, we will just shrug and hope the company responsible for the incident is transparent and forthcoming in their internal investigation /s
conorjh|8 months ago
[deleted]
BurningFrog|8 months ago
[deleted]
spauldo|8 months ago
Everyone gets hung up on money and they don't pay attention to value. The CSB annual budget is less than some of the contracts I work on, automating fuel farms on military bases. They're good value for money.
CaliforniaKarl|8 months ago
If a regulatory agency is also doing investigations, they may choose to focus less on their own 'failings' (that is, their agency's rules/guidance or lack of rules/guidance), and focus more on others' failings. Or, they may choose to focus less on other agencies' failings for political reasons.
Having a third party, with no regulatory ability, helps to reduce the appearance of bias, and increase trust in the industry that the third party investigates.