President Trump's push to deregulate swaths of the federal government could have particularly disturbing impacts for automotive safety, advocates say — not least in the autonomous vehicle sector that directly enriches Elon Musk.
In an executive order filed last week that citied Musk's Department of Government Efficiency initiative, the president directed federal agencies to "review all regulations subject to their sole or joint jurisdiction for consistency with law and Administration policy," a subtle phrasing that one good government advocate called "a flat-out gift to Big Business" meant to "green-light a corporate crime spree."
“The executive order is not some small move about purported red tape," Robert Weissman of Public Citizen said in a statement. "Combined with the other destructive moves of the Trump-Musk administration, it is also making it far, far more likely that the country will experience preventable health, environmental, and economic disasters.”
A common disaster that's mitigated through regulations, of course, are car crashes — though the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has a terrible track record of promptly implementing many rules.
Even prior to the Trump era, NHTSA has routinely blown the deadlines set by Congress to implement new vehicle safety standards mandated under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and every major transportation bill that came before it, with the Office of the Inspector General finding during the first Trump administration that NHTSA missed deadlines to review new rules 87.5 percent of the time.
Photo: Kids and Car Safety
But that may turn out to be a model of efficiency, especially as Musk's DOGE moves to slash the agency's relatively paltry 800 employees by 4 percent. The Trump administration defends those cuts as a course-correction from the Biden era, during which the agency grew by 30 percent, but safety experts worry about slashing regulators when road deaths are still high.
"We're in this new world where a lot of things are being flung in the air, and we don't know exactly what they mean yet," said Cathy Chase, president of the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. "From our perspective, the rulemakings that we pushed the Department of Transportation to take action on are almost explicitly directed by Congress. ... Now, whether they [implement them] during this administration or not — I would think most likely not."
Chase is particularly worried about the fate of the Automatic Emergency Braking rule, which was finalized last April before being hit with a lawsuit just days before Trump took office and frozen shortly thereafter. She fears the administration could amend or eliminate the AEB rule outright, which the Alliance for Automotive Safety called "practically impossible with available technology," even though 90 percent of new cars already come outfitted with it.
"We honestly don't know what could happen next, but that's a possibility — and that would be really tragic, because we worked for about a decade to try to get this AEB rule across the finish line," Chase said. "We know how many lives AEB can save. It's already in so many cars. It's not like we're asking for new technology to be innovated; it's already out there."
Chase also fears for the future of autonomous vehicle regulation, for which the Biden administration was just beginning to lay the groundwork when Trump — and his unelected aide, the chainsaw-wielding aide Tesla CEO — took up office in the White House.
Shortly after the election, a leaked document from Trump's transition team suggested that the administration would eliminate an order requiring auto manufacturers to report details about any crashes involving automated vehicle technology to the federal government. Tesla had reported more than 1,500 crashes by the time that information was made public — and reporters for Reuters said that shielding the company from scrutiny "could cripple the government’s ability to investigate and regulate the safety" of AV-equipped vehicles like theirs.
"I can't imagine that they're going to want to continue to give any kind of information to the agency," added Chase. "They want to run autonomous vehicles without any true regulation of safeguards."
Trump hasn't rescinded the AV crash reporting order just yet, but advocates are already fearful about the havoc that could follow if he did.
Chase is particularly concerned that AV manufacturers might seek more exemptions from federal safety standards that still require them to outfit their cars with basic features like steering wheels and brakes, over which a human operator could seize control if the "self-driving" technology fails. Shortly before leaving office, the Biden administration proposed a new voluntary framework called AV STEP (or the Autonomous Vehicle Safety Transparency, and Evaluation Program) that would "help the agency study and oversee automated driving technology as it matures" by standardizing the exemption and crash reporting process, among other changes.
Even that relatively industry-friendly initiative, though, might soon find itself in the crosshairs.
"We are preparing for more cuts, especially considering the influence that Mr. Musk has on this administration and his desire to move forward with autonomous vehicles," Chase added. "We're concerned that there's going to be a big push to allow autonomous vehicles throughout the country without any kind of safety regulations and that the American public are going to be the ones who who suffer because of this."
With roughly three out of seven people charged with overseeing the safety of autonomous vehicles out of a job, the media will have to fill the information vacuum left by an agency that is lethargic about crashes with autonomous vehicles — and that public safety and the AV industry itself will suffer when journalists aren't up to that impossible task, Chase said.
"We are not anti-autonomous vehicle. We are concerned that absent safety regulations, the motoring public might not even know that AVs are running if they start to look more like your traditional car," Chase added. "They're guinea pigs on the roads. ... There's not going to be any regulation, there's not going to be any information collected about them, and we're [only] going hear about what happens based on the media. And there's no way that the media will be able to cover crashes happening throughout the country; it will be an impossibility if these are deployed in a massive way."
Most of all, Chase stresses that every NHTSA regulation undergoes rigorous review to ensure it won't harm the economy, and that "in addition to saving lives and preventing injuries, these rules are cost-saving."
If DOGE is serious about its mission of increasing "government efficiency" rather than fueling an automakers' free-for-all, it should take that message to heart.
