The problem is that in the FAA's domain, there are legitimately situations where bureaucracy is indispensable. For example, they just issued an AD to require inspections of a few specific bolts on early production 787s because Boeing thinks they MAY have bolted the wings on with incorrectly sized shims, which over a decade MAY contribute to accelerated fatigue on these parts. Not a single plane has crashed but this kind of thing has caused other planes to crash in the past.

These airplanes are flying all over the world, the inspections need ultrasonic data, and the FAA has to validate that all of them are done. Even identifying this issue required lots of bureaucracy.

Multiply that by the number of airplanes and airplane models and it's easy to see why they move so slowly: when you are putting millions of people in the air each day, enforcing absurdly specific rules with an iron fist requires a monster of a bureaucracy.