550 Federal Employees Guard 39,000 Annual Traffic Deaths. The Man Who Cut Their Ranks Has the Most Open Investigations.

Seven people. That was the entire NHTSA team responsible for evaluating whether autonomous vehicles are safe enough to share American roads with 230 million licensed drivers. Seven federal employees scrutinizing every self-driving crash report, every software update claim, every manufacturer's safety case from Tesla to Waymo to Zoox. Then DOGE fired three of them.^[1]

The cuts came courtesy of the Department of Government Efficiency, an initiative directed by Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla. You know Tesla. It is the company that has more open NHTSA safety investigations than any other automaker, the company linked to 46 deaths and 1,932 injuries in crashes involving its Full Self-Driving and Autopilot systems.^[2] The self-driving safety division was formed in 2023. Many of its members were still in their probationary hiring period. DOGE targeted probationary employees across the federal government. That is how you gut a newly created safety team without technically targeting it.

"The amount of people in the federal government who are able to understand this adequately is very small," one of the fired engineers told The Washington Post. "Now it's almost nonexistent."^[3]

Four investigators remain. They oversee every autonomous vehicle and advanced driver-assistance system deployed on U.S. roads. Four people for an industry that shipped 17.4 million new vehicles last year, each carrying more software than a Boeing 737.

But the self-driving team was just the visible wound. Dig into the numbers and the institutional damage runs deeper. NHTSA grew from roughly 600 employees to 790 between 2021 and 2024, a deliberate expansion to handle expanding mandates around EVs, advanced driver assistance, and crash-data modernization. By the end of 2025, the headcount had dropped to approximately 550.^[4] That is a 30% reduction. The impaired-driving division, which oversees the data systems that track whether drunk and drugged drivers are killing people, shrank from seven employees to two. The behavioral research division, which studied distracted driving, speeding patterns, and seatbelt compliance, went from 16 researchers to three or four.^[4]

Run the math on what 550 employees actually means. In 2024, NHTSA issued 1,073 safety recalls covering more than 29 million vehicles.^[5] That works out to roughly two recalls per employee. The United States averages over 39,000 traffic fatalities per year.^[6] That is 71 dead Americans per NHTSA employee, annually, as an oversight burden. Each of those deaths generated investigative paperwork, crash reconstructions, manufacturer correspondence, potential enforcement actions. The workload did not shrink 30%. The workforce did.

Congress allocated $750 million through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law specifically for crash-data modernization, the kind of infrastructure that might actually close the drug-testing gaps in FARS that leave 91% of drug-involved fatalities unmeasured.^[7] As of January 2026, more than $475 million of that fund sat unused. The money is set to expire in September unless it is obligated through signed agreements. A GAO report found that nearly a quarter of entities awarded grants in 2022 had not yet received a signed agreement when surveyed between December 2024 and March 2025. Over one in five grantees reported that getting timely replies from Department of Transportation staff was "moderately or very challenging."^[4]

Hard to reply promptly when your office lost a third of its people.

Meanwhile, NHTSA has no administrator, no deputy administrator, and no director of governmental affairs, policy, or strategic planning, all three positions vacant since January 2025.^[1] A nominee was eventually put forward: Jonathan Morrison, an Apple employee who previously served as NHTSA's chief counsel during the first Trump administration. The confirmation clock is ticking while the agency runs headless.

Michael Brooks, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, saw this coming months before the cuts landed. "If the first Trump presidency is any indication, we will see NHTSA's now-active rulemaking division come to a screeching halt," he told the Detroit Free Press. Defect investigations during Trump's first term were "near all-time lows, making it very difficult for the agency to uncover defects and influence safety recalls."^[1]

The rulemaking pipeline is staggering. The AEB mandate requires all new vehicles to include automatic emergency braking by September 2029. Pedestrian-protection standards and connected-vehicle cybersecurity guidance are both overdue. Impaired-driving detection technology, mandated by the 2021 infrastructure law, awaits rulemaking. EV battery safety protocols are still being drafted. Each of these is a multi-year regulatory process requiring specialized engineers, data analysts, and legal staff, and the agency now has fewer of all three.

Limitations

The 550-employee figure comes from KFF Health News reporting based on federal workforce data; NHTSA's official statement says the agency "remains larger than it had in previous administrations" despite the cuts. The exact breakdown of which roles were eliminated beyond the AV team and impaired-driving division has not been publicly disclosed. Musk and Trump pledged that Musk would not be involved in decisions constituting a conflict of interest, though the structural incentive remains regardless of direct involvement. NHTSA's effectiveness problems predate the current cuts. Ed Niedermeyer has noted Tesla was "flouting NHTSA for years" before DOGE existed.^[1]

Strongest counterargument

NHTSA grew 30% under Biden. That growth may have included positions that were administratively redundant or poorly scoped. Cutting a bloated agency back toward its pre-expansion baseline could, in theory, force prioritization and eliminate bureaucratic drag. The counter-counter: the expansion was explicitly designed to address new safety mandates that did not exist before 2021, including autonomous-vehicle oversight, EV battery safety, and crash-data modernization. Cutting the staff hired to fulfill those mandates does not eliminate the mandates. It eliminates the capacity to execute them.

What you can do

Check your vehicle for open recalls at nhtsa.gov/recalls. File a complaint about safety defects at nhtsa.gov/report-a-safety-problem. Every complaint filed creates a data point the reduced workforce still has to evaluate. Volume is the one lever consumers still control. If you are shopping for a vehicle with driver-assist features, check IIHS partial automation safeguard ratings at iihs.org/ratings. Do not rely on manufacturer marketing claims about safety systems that a four-person federal team is supposed to be validating.