Elon appears to be building a large ground-locked monument to demonstrate his argument in this tweet: Unlike its aircraft division, which is fine, the FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure. Their rules are meant for a handful of expendable launches per year from a few government facilities. Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars. -- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/13548625…
It should be remembered that the unspoken rule of any agency or institution is to justify its own continued existence. For be bureaucracy that is the FAA, all the onerous requirements they place on spaceflight is a feature, not a bug.
The bureaucracy at the FAA has protected millions of airline passengers over the course of decades. Just look at how one minor discrepancy in an aircraft can lead to a total loss of the jet and hundreds of lives lost. Now combine that with a rocket loaded with a hundred thousand gallons of fuel and it's understandable that we should be careful. I don't want our space-faring expeditions to look like China's, where they're okay dumping hydrazine on local villages [1].
1: https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/01/04/photos-long-march-rock...