[AllegedWisdom]

I definitely understand that centralized bureaucracy and decision making can be very harmful. I also know that the lack of centralized bureaucracy and decision making can also be very harmful, for example by killing tens of thousands of people with trans fats (or air pollution, or communicable diseases, etc.) We are playing an unavoidable game for very high stakes, where inaction can be as lethal as action.

The typical cycle is that something obviously bad happens to an identifiable victim that can be traced to lack of regulation, then congress and/or the courts force regulation, and then the regulation causes a lot of invisible harm that may or may not be greater than the harm it prevents. My job is to try to make these inevitable regulations do more good than harm.

There would have been a public notice and comment period before the rule went final. But industry often fails to notice things, and quite often, when industry asks for standards to be lowered, consumer groups reflexively insist that they remain as proposed. The outcome ends up being based mainly on politics, which is why getting the proposal right matters.