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> the FDA over-regulates rather than under regulates.

It seems more accurate to say it does both simultaneously, or that it mis-regulates.

It fails to regulate some things that it should have (such as this), and it regulates other things that are better left alone.

And we should expect any noisy estimator to do that in general: there are always going to be both false positives and false negatives.

One thing we should be careful about though is to distinguish between arguments over the relative propensity of either, vs. the relative weighting that should be given to each.

E.g. sometimes people say 'no, the FDA over-regulates rather than under-regulates', when what they really mean is that the find that specific instances of over-regulation to be very harmful, while they think that the examples of under-regulation can be ignored.