I'm afraid this is the logical consequence of a majority of people falling for the lie that "government can't do things as efficiently as the private sector".

When people vote for politicians who say

  "government is wasteful",
  "there's too much red tape"

what did they think was going to happen?

Of course the FDA has to regulate 10s of 1000s of companies\drugs\trials. The FAA basically just oversees Boeing and Airbus in the large commercial jet market and either offers 10s of models...

And FINRA is made up of brokers and banks but overseen by the SEC. The EPA doesn't directly monitor every factory. The NTSB sets general testing guidelines and standards and seems to have greatly increased auto and aviation safety, but they can't police everything and at least to the public seem to regulate after the fact.

The general term, I believe, is self-regulatory-organization. The theory, I guess, is that the government sets the laws and says very generally, "no fraud", and "you have to write your own rules and make sure they're good", but offers little technical guidance otherwise. I think this could work well if there were very heavy penalties for failures to self-police, but in practice the revolving door between government and industry incentivizes slap on the wrist style punishment. It's a hard problem and I don't think we're doing well over the last few decades.

Yeah, people are are drastically underestimating how enormous the testing apparatus is at a company like Boeing. It's thousands of employees. Expecting the FAA to duplicate those efforts is ridiculous.

I don't know much about the FAA, but as someone who works in healthcare, I know the FDA conducts regular audits of medical device manufacturers.

They roll in for a week, request access to everything and everywhere, then pick a handful of areas (randomly) to do a full deep-dive. Generally, if a company is cutting corners, discrepancies will exist in many areas and they'll quickly spot one or more of them. I assume the FAA operates similarly.

Indeed. The FDA just has a multi-step process where you need to define how you'll run your trials, what data you'll collect and whether it's enough to get approval.

The FDA very carefully reviews the submissions, requires validation of tests and safeguards so data can't easily be manipulated. But the system is built on trust. If a company wants to manipulate, fake or exclude negative data they can. They'll likely get caught, but not always.

Similar for many other things, the report most countries based the safety of roundup on was written by Monsanto itself. Most countries only check these reports for completeness and obvious errors, they don't try to run the studies themselves. However that "error checking" of the report is something where the FAA fucked up, the information on the MCAS provided by Boeing was completely out of date, either the documented testing procedures where incomplete or the FAA did not notice that the MCAS handled cases far outside of its original specification.