Phooey on Both Houses?

For weeks now, we’ve been hearing from certain quarters that the way to improve trucking safety is to transfer federal oversight from the Federal Highway Administration to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

FHWA critics, from Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) to Joan Claybrook’s Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways and the Ralph Nader-affiliated Public Citizen, have been behind the charge to move the agency’s Office of Motor Carriers, alleging that FHWA is too closely aligned with the trucking industry to properly regulate it.

They have said that moving safety enforcement to NHTSA would be a major step forward, because that agency cares more about saving lives and less about the industry.

Trucking’s reaction to the proposed change has been negative, although relatively restrained. “NHTSA is an engineering agency. It sets design standards. It is not a highway enforcement agency,” said American Trucking Associations President Walter B. McCormick Jr.

This dispute makes some recent statements by consumer crusader Ralph Nader all the more interesting.

NHTSA has become “a meek consulting firm to the auto industry,” and one that has been “caving in” to the industry’s lobbyists, said Mr. Nader late last month.

“NHTSA has become a half-way house, training specialists to make the companies make safer cars, and then watching these specialists leave to work for the companies and show them how to defeat NHTSA and lawsuits in the courts,” he said.

That’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the agency being championed for its safety record by others. And it’s hard to imagine that Mr. Nader would support the shifting of more safety programs to an agency that he holds in such low regard.

Perhaps the answer is to go ahead and shift OMC to NHTSA, and then transfer NHTSA to FHWA. Then nothing would be improved, but all parties to the dispute could claim a victory. Ah, democracy at its best.