Washington Post – DOGE employee cuts fall heavily on agency that regulates Musk’s Tesla
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is losing about 10 percent of its workforce through firings and buyout offers, according to people briefed on the cuts.
Editors note: Absolutely no one is surprised by this move. Ironically, this could greatly delay Tesla being able to move forward with their imaginary robotaxi efforts, allegedly in June.
See original article by Ian Duncan at Washington Post
A small government team regulating the sort of autonomous cars that Elon Musk says represent the future of Tesla, his car company, is getting cut nearly in half by the Musk-led U.S. Doge Service, according to people briefed on the reductions.
The loss of personnel from the specialized unit is part of a 10 percent overall workforce reduction at the federal agency tasked with ensuring safety on America’s roads. In all, the agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, will lose between 70 and 80 people, split roughly evenly between firings of probationary employees and buyouts, according to three people, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.
The losses touch on many aspects of the agency’s safety work, according to fired workers who also spoke with the The Washington Post: an engineer who worked with crash test dummies, employees who work with states on safety grant funding, and a research psychologist focused on drunken driving and speeding.
“It was just very jarring to go from saving lives one day to being locked out of your computer the next,” said one terminated employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid hurting his prospects of finding a new job.
DOGE’s slash-and-burn approach also eliminated three out of roughly seven people in a new officecharged with overseeing the safety of autonomous vehicles, one person familiar with the cuts said. Fired workers said they do not believe they were targeted specifically because they are examining driverless cars, which remain a new and controversial technology. But one of them said the upshot is the same, with less scrutiny of robotic vehicles.
“If the question is, will this affect the federal government’s ability to understand the safety case behind Tesla’s vehicles, then yes, it will,” said one terminated engineer. “The amount of people in the federal government who are able to understand this adequately is very small. Now it’s almost nonexistent.”
The Transportation Department and NHTSA did not respond to requests for comment on the job losses. The U.S. DOGE Service, Musk’s unit at the White House, and Tesla also did not respond to requests for comment.
The job losses were part of widespread, messy cuts to federal agencies led by DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency.
At the Transportation Department, another division, the Federal Aviation Administration, terminated roughly 400 probationary employees last week; newly hired workers at other transportation agencies that oversee railroad and transit safety and fund infrastructure projects say they were also terminated in recent days.
NHTSA employed nearly 800 people as of January. It is relatively small but plays a leading role in the federal government’s efforts to reduce the annual death toll on the nation’s roads. It works on improving driver behavior, sets rules for the safety of vehicles and holds the power to recall dangerous cars and trucks. In recent years its work has increasingly involved overseeing new driver assistance technologies and fully robotic vehicles — including investigations of safety risks in Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving technologies.
The agency has faced criticism from safety advocacy groups that it has done too little to rein in the technologies and been too slow to write rules to govern them.
In addition to Tesla, other companies also have a direct interest in how NHTSA approaches regulation of self-driving cars, including Alphabet’s Waymo and Amazon’s Zoox. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts), Minority Leader Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) and other Democrats sent a letter to Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy on Thursday demanding information on the scale of the job losses at NHTSA and across the Transportation Department, and answers about their implications for the traveling public.
“The Trump administration appears to have little respect for these workers or understanding of their critical importance to safety,” the senators wrote.
Steven Bradbury, Trump’s pick to be the transportation department’s No. 2 official, said during a Senate confirmation hearing Thursday that Duffy was focused on ensuring that funding and staffing cuts were “made without compromising safety.”
“He’ll ensure that safety critical staffing is sufficient to address those needs,” Bradbury said.
Musk’s variousroles represent numerous potential conflicts of interest. He is a leading figure in the Trump administration with responsibility for slashing the federal workforce and spending. At the same time he is the leader of companies, including Tesla and rocket firm SpaceX, that are regulated by the same agencies his team is targeting for cuts.
Trump and Musk said in a joint interview with Fox News this week that Musk would not be involved in any work that poses a conflict with his business interests.
NHTSA has been responsible for investigating the safety of Tesla’s vehicles as Musk has put increasingly sophisticated driver assistance technology in the hands of regular drivers. Tesla plans toput fully autonomous vehicles on the road this year. An agency investigation led to a recall of 2 million vehicles in December 2023, and it disclosed in April that it had documented numerous deadly crashes involving Autopilot.
NHTSA is also investigating deadly crashes involving Ford’s driver assistance technology and safety problems with Waymo and Zoox’s autonomous vehicles.
TheTrump administration has said it wants to help get more autonomous vehicles on the road by creating a framework to oversee them.
“Autonomous vehicles, if done right, can make our roadways way safer,” Duffy said during a department-wide employee town hall Friday. “That’s the vision.”
But NHTSA has struggled for years to ensure the safety of new technologies that take over much of the job of driving from humans or replace drivers altogether. The systemslargely fall outside existing safety rules, so Tesla and other companies have been free to put them on the road with limited federal oversight.
Under the Biden administration, NHTSA grew steadily from about 600 employees. As part of that growth the agency built the team of seven or so experts to better understand autonomous systems and take responsibility for regulating them. The team was small, and because it was relatively new and had recently hired a number of employees from outside the federal government, it was vulnerable to DOGE effort targeting probationary employees.
Shortly beforePresident Donald Trump was elected, Musk said he would seek to use his role in the administration to have the federal government create a framework for autonomous vehicles, although he did not provide details. Tesla’s stock price surged after the election, as investors bet that his influence would benefit the company.
Duffy said during his Senate confirmation hearing that he would allow ongoing investigations into Tesla and other manufacturers to proceed. NHTSA has also left in place a Biden administration order that requires companies to disclose crashes involving automated vehicles and driver assistance systems. Tesla reported 84 incidents between mid-December and mid-January, according to a batch of data released on Tuesday, in line with previous months.
The FAA is by far the largest agency at the Transportation Department, employing almost 47,000 of its nearly 58,000 workers. While NHTSA gets far less attention than the FAA, another engineer who was terminated said its staff are keenly aware of the dangers on the roads.
“It sticks with me that we’re still in this place of about 40,000 deaths a year and a million or so pretty bad injuries,” said the engineer, who took a pay cut and accepted a long commute to start a job at the agency. “We’re a small organization who are passionate about that mission.”
See original article by Ian Duncan at Washington Post
