Trimming of transportation rules and delay on new ones a safety issue, some say
Republican administration loath to add rules
WASHINGTON — On a clear, dry June evening in 2015, cars and trucks rolled slowly in a herkyjerky backup ahead of an Interstate 75 construction zone in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Barrelling toward them: an 18-ton tractor-trailer going about 130 km/h.
Despite multiple signs warning of slow traffic, the driver, with little or no braking, bashed into eight vehicles before coming to a stop about 1 1/2 football fields away. Six people died in the mangled wreck and four more were hurt. The driver was convicted of vehicular homicide and other charges last month.
In response to this and similar crashes, the government in 2016 proposed requiring that new heavy trucks have potentially life-saving software that would electronically limit speeds. But now, like many other safety rules in the works before President Donald Trump took office, it has been delayed indefinitely by the Transportation Department as part of a sweeping retreat from regulations that the president says slow the economy.
An Associated Press review of the department’s rule making activities in Trump’s first year in office shows at least a dozen safety rules that were under development or already adopted have been repealed, withdrawn, delayed or put on the back burner. In most cases, those rules are opposed by powerful industries. And the political appointees running the agencies that write the rules often come from the industries they regulate.
Meanwhile, there have been no significant new safety rules adopted over the same period.
The sidelined rules would have, among other things, required states to conduct annual inspections of commercial bus operators, railroads to operate trains with at least two crew members and automakers to equip future cars and light trucks with vehicle-to-vehicle communications to prevent collisions. Many of the rules were prompted by tragic events.
“These rules have been written in blood,” said John Risch, national legislative director for the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers. “But we’re in a new era now of little-to-no new regulations no matter how beneficial they might be. The focus is what can we repeal and rescind.”
Trump has made reducing regulations a priority, seeing many rules as an unnecessary burden on industry. Last month he tweeted that his administration “has terminated more UNNECESSARY Regulations, in just 12 months, than any other Administration has terminated during their full term in office ...”
“The good news is,” he wrote, “THERE IS MUCH MORE TO COME!”
The Transportation Department declined requests for an interview with Secretary Elaine Chao, Deputy Secretary Jeffrey Rosen to discuss safety regulations. Instead, the department provided a brief statement from James Owens, DOT’s deputy general counsel, saying that new administrations typically take a “fresh look” at regulations.
The department’s position has been that it can reduce regulation without undermining safety.
“We will not finalize a rule simply because it has advanced through preliminary steps,” the statement said. “Even if a rule is one step away, if that rule is not justifiable because it harms safety and imposes unnecessarily high economic costs, for example, that rule will not advance.”