U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), ranking member of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said the Trump Administration’s “gutting” of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will put Americans at risk as more autonomous vehicles hit American roads.
Cantwell said a weakened NHTSA will make regulating autonomous vehicles more challenging, and protecting consumers while supporting the future growth of self-driving cars more difficult.
“Fully autonomous vehicles offer the potential to reduce crashes on roads, but we have seen the risk of letting companies’ beta-test on our roads with no guardrails,” Cantwell during a hearing on the future of AVs. “In 2024 a report from NHTSA linked Tesla’s autopilot to hundreds of crashes, including at least 13 fatal crashes and many more injuries. Safety advocates have linked 65 fatalities to Tesla’s automated technologies.”
The senator criticized efforts by the Trump administration to gut the federal agency that is responsible for ensuring vehicle safety and for developing safety standards. The agency lost a quarter of its employees due to DOGE, and at one point the agency’s Office of Automation responsible for overseeing AV technology had only four people.
Sen. Cantwell sharply criticized efforts by the Trump administration to gut NHTSA, the federal agency responsible for ensuring vehicle safety and developing safety standards. She noted that through DOGE cuts, the agency lost 25 percent of its employees, and at one point the Office of Automation—responsible for overseeing autonomous vehicle technology—had just four people.
“Fewer resources mean less enforcement,” she said. “NHTSA launched 41 percent fewer recall investigations last year than in 2024.”
Additionally, Cantwell said AV technology requires a new regulatory approach beyond the existing Motor Vehicle Safety Act which was put in place more than half a century ago. The new standards, she said, require a properly resourced agency with technical expertise.
“The Federal Motor Safety Standards has prevented over 18 million crashes,” she said. “However, the Federal Motor [Vehicle] Safety Standards were designed to regulate bumpers, and car doors, and seat belts and a variety of things that they’re not on top of today. This revolutionary technology needs a new approach to safety that provides for flexible guardrails for beta testing and a clear path to safe commercial deployment. It needs to have an educated, as I just mentioned, strong, safety oversight from officials and the resources to make it the gold standard, just like we need in aviation.”
In the hearing, Bryant Walker Smith, association professor of law at the University of South Carolina’s Rice School of Law said putting standards in the hands of the companies developing technology was a mistake.
“The companies in this field are necessarily saying to regulators and to the public, ‘trust us,’ and that needs to come with substance, right?” Smith said. “With great power comes great responsibility. So, they need to say, here’s what we’re doing, here’s why we believe it’s safe, and here’s why you can trust us. And then that needs to be interrogated by, as you’ve described, competent, capable, well-resourced officials. The idea that our automated driving office could fit in the McDonald’s, or our defects agency could fit in a warehouse, is astounding to me, for a country of this size and sophistication.”