Any time the government gets involved with something whether it's what kind of milk you drink what kind of plant you smoke, it is going to make the situation worse. The only thing Washington can do is fail....at nearly everything. The only thing it does successfully is overspend and over tax us into an 18.5 trillion dollar hole, one that can never be repaid.
So how is the government going to regulate this part of the hobby without entirely messing things up? Think Amtrak, Medicare, Medicaid, the war on drugs, the war on poverty and the war on terrorism: all failures, all costly to the point where any sane businessman would have closed the doors a long time ago.
DOT is another bureaucracy run wild just like the EPA and we all know how well they've been doing their job lately but it's always the bureaucrats in Washington who seriously believe the know better and they know what's best for us and just like every other bureaucracy, it tends to expand its authority over more of our lives.