Elon Musk's chainsaw has been swinging through the federal government over the last few weeks, with his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) chopping down budgets and excising staff at a number of agencies.Among those affected is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which is said to be losing about 10 percent of its relatively small headcount through buyouts and firings.According to , between 70 and 80 people are departing the agency, which is responsible for road safety in the US.Those ex-employees are said to have worked in a number of areas, such as safety grant funding and crash test dummies.The DOGE cull also impacted three people from a very small team that was working on the safety of autonomous vehicles, such as those from Alphabet’s Waymo, Amazon’s Zoox and — hey, look at that! — Elon Musk's Tesla.
It's probably just a coincidence that an organization headed by the same person who is CEO of a prominent company that's working on self-driving cars has cut federal employees that are evaluating the safety of such technology.Probably.ADVERTISEMENTAdvertisement“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,” one of the fired engineers told .“The amount of people in the federal government who are able to understand this adequately is very small.
Now it’s almost nonexistent.”The NHTSA expanded from around 600 workers to 800 or so during the Biden administration.The autonomous vehicle oversight team was formed as part of that growth.Since several of its seven or so members were new to the federal government, their employment status was at risk due to a DOGE initiative to cull probationary employees from the federal workforce, as notes.
Other agencies that have been impacted include the Federal Aviation Administration, which last week cut around 400 probationary employees.Musk and President Donald Trump pledged in an interview this week that the former, who has been designated as a "special government employee," wouldn't be involved in decisions that would mark a conflict of interest with his businesses.The NHTSA has issued numerous recalls for Tesla vehicles over the years (including a recall of more than 2 million vehicles to fix Autopilot safety controls).In April 2024, the agency released the results of an investigation into 14 deaths linked to driver misuse of the company's Autopilot feature.Last month, Musk said that Tesla will roll out a paid autonomous ride-hailing service in Austin this June.
