I am not advocating that every aspect of a system is tested by an agency, I am simply saying that there should be a body that ensures that safety-critical software development follows a basic set of best practices - avoiding some of pitfalls mentioned in the article.

Yes, it's an potentially acceptable tradeoff. While the figures vary, economists and the like have estimates of how many people you'll kill for every N million dollars you extract from the economy (and they're below 10 million last time I checked). Just how much do you propose to extract with such a regime?