> Allowing your personal crusade against a person to impact your regulatory duties as a government official should land you in jail. Because what you're doing in your regulatory oversight position should be regulatory oversight of the issue not trying to impend on someone's freedom of speech.
If you're just 5% slower at answering requests to people you dislike in favor of people you like, imagine how much this weighs down a person in aggregate across all actors and decision makers in the state space. This wouldn't even have to be a conscious bias here, it could be a completely subconscious preference.
I agree that there can be unconscious bias and how you execute things. This is something that should be relatively easy to control for. When performing at your duties the assignment should be handed out in an impartial fashion you have a stack first in first out. You can simply measure the time to completion and the deviation. This should give you a good enough metric to know to look if there is potentially a deeper issues happening. It could be reviews from SpaceX take longer because the technology is different or is rapidly changing or a host of other factors. Once you know the actual metrics is when you can start to examine if it's bias conscious or subconscious or just the nature of the request.
The op was indicating an actual conscious bias that they indicated would cause them to institute delays which is where the real problem comes down to.
If you're just 5% slower at answering requests to people you dislike in favor of people you like, imagine how much this weighs down a person in aggregate across all actors and decision makers in the state space. This wouldn't even have to be a conscious bias here, it could be a completely subconscious preference.