Eh, that doesn’t sound like it?
1) Boeing lays off thousands of aerospace engineers regularly (they did as part of the max disaster), and doesn’t rehire them all back - the industry is highly cyclical, and Boeing is periodically shifting locations anyway
2) the stated concern was Boeing brass was applying undue influence to engineering correct? If those folks worked for the FAA directly after being laid off , wouldn’t they be more than happy to stick it to Boeing brass if they were telling them to cut corners?
3) we’re talking design overview and identifying where Boeing (or others) may be ‘putting their finger on the scale’ or trying to snow regulators by asserting bogus test results or designing tests that they can pass by not including important test criteria they may not pass right? That is certainly something an engineer who was previously in the industry would be aware of, or even a independent engineer should be capable of spotting from ‘the outside’ - and require they do.
4) at (linked in a parallel thread) a median salary of $118k, which is well within something the feds could cover, the FAA can certainly afford to hire a non-token amount of aerospace engineers onto their staff if they actually wanted too/Congress wasn’t trying to kill them. This isn’t like hiring on a FAANG staff software eng for 700k or whatever which would cause outrage or break the pay scale, and this is for something for which there are clear large body counts that can be pointed at.
Now if we want to say Congress has been strangling the FAA for a long time (like the IRS and USPS) and forcing them to outsource to industry or whatever, hey - I could believe it - but that is something that should be yelled from the rooftops because that can be fixed, and that will cost us a lot in blood.
I don’t want more Americans dead due to corruption of a regulatory process, especially not my friends or family, and those are the stakes here.