The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration grew by around 30 percent under the Biden Administration, but it’s now moving in the opposite direction. As part of the Trump Administration’s cost-cutting efforts, the NHTSA laid off four percent of its staff, cutting deep into its 800-strong workforce.
An NHTSA statement said, “We have retained positions critical to the mission of saving lives, preventing injuries, and reducing economic costs due to road traffic crashes.” The statement also noted that the NHTSA would continue to “enforce the law on all manufacturers of motor vehicles and equipment.”
While there are many government employees waking up without jobs this week, the NHTSA cuts are particularly interesting because of the agency’s links to Tesla. It has been investigating the automaker’s semi-autonomous driver-assistance features after several crashes, at least one of which was fatal.
The effects of the layoffs won’t known for a while, but a newly appointed agency official said the NHTSA would take a balanced and fair approach to pursuing the Tesla investigations. That said, of the seven people focused primarily on investigating autonomous vehicle tech, three were fired. The agency remains larger than it was before Biden’s term after the cuts, but the workforce reduction will slow the NHTSA’s work.
Carl Tobias from the University of Richmond Law School told The Detroit Free Press, “The short and cute answer is more people will be injured, more people will die. Some of the (fired NHTSA) employees are saying that. There aren’t that many people who fully understand what this group of seven do. If you cut that in half, it’s going to undermine the regulation of autonomous vehicles. That’s what’s at stake.”
[Images: Tesla]
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