Recently, Lex Fridman had Elon on his podcast and they just so happened to talk about his recent struggle with bureaucracies, specifically the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Elon (as billionaire often do) is trying to launch his rocket, Starship, into space; but he's spent the last few months jumping through some peculiar hoops to do so.
First, FWS was EXTREMELY concerned about a shark or whale getting his by his rocket on descent. Now you would think they could pretty quickly calculate the probability of this occurring, but it took a few months of dealing with permissions issues and data moving back and forth through internal departments for them to figure it out. Turns out... P(Rocket hitting shark/whale) = pretty much 0.
Then, they were worried about the sonic booms of the rocket launch may disrupt seal procreation in California. To prove this wasn't the case Starlink kidnapped a seal, put headphones on it, and played sonic boom sounds to it...twice. (I swear the picture below is real)
We, the voters, indirectly paid this organization $3.7 billion in 2023. Because we're all rationally ignorant individuals, I highly doubt any of us know in depth what this organization does day to day or even knew it existed at all. However, even if we did, how would we measure their output? The amount of sharks they save from rockets, the number of seals born, or how much they annoy Elon Musk? It is possible that these monitoring problems play significant role in extremely slow and expensive processes or their huge budget.
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