FAA accused of lax aircraft inspections

CSPAN covered the FAA hearings live. The House transportation committee held hearings about FAA inspections and the Southwest Airlines $10 million dollar fine. Something has gone wrong with FAA. The committee heard from a bunch of working level FAA inspectors, the guys who are supposed to walk the flight line and hangers looking at airplanes, and make sure they are air worthy. The working stiffs all accused FAA senior management of suppressing inspections, supressing reports of bad aircraft maintenance, and giving airlines the OK to fly passengers in planes that were out of compliance (planes that had not been inspected or reworked in accordance with air worthiness directives).
This is fairly bad. "The air, even more than the sea, is terribly unforgiving of the smallest mistake". I spent six years doing aircraft maintenance for USAF. On the flight line we all knew that if the plane broke in flight, the aircrew could die. That was a tremendous incentive to do things right lest you bear the guilt of causing a fatal aircraft accident. This attitude goes all around the aviation business. I'm sure Southwest's maintenance guys have it.
But then there are operational pressures. "We need that airplane to fly a mission today. If we can't fly it we will have to cancel a scheduled flight and leave our passengers stranded in the airport".
That aircraft is in good shape except an air worthiness directive hasn't been complied with yet.
The air worthiness directive says something like "After 5000 landings, inspect wiring in a hard to get to place for chafing. " Hard to get to might mean drilling out rivets and pulling off sheet metal, might take a day to pull the plane apart, inspect the wiring and then put it back together again. The plane has exactly 5000 landings.
A reasonable man might decide that nobody is going to get hurt if the plane makes a few more landings before the inspection.
On the other hand, if short cuts are permitted here, then soon enough they will be permitted there, and somewhere else, and pretty soon anything goes. The job of the FAA inspector is to say "No short cuts, ever".
According to testimony I watched on CSPAN, senior FAA management was permitting short cuts, over the objections of the line inspectors.
Time for a new FAA administrator and laying off the top two or three layers of FAA management.