Driverless car companies are racing to scoop up top federal safety officials to fill out their ranks of advisers and lobbyists — creating worries that the fledgling industry will use its newly acquired influence to shape the coming wave of government regulations.
Companies like Uber, Lyft, General Motors and Google’s sibling Waymo have hired a phalanx of current and former Washington officials, including Obama administration Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, several DOT highway regulators and two former chairs of the National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency that investigates deadly crashes.
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And some people have started taking the revolving door back to Washington: David Strickland, who led DOT’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration under President Barack Obama, returned to the Senate on Monday after a five-year stint lobbying for the self-driving car industry. Now he is the Democratic staff director on the Senate Commerce Committee, where he will have significant influence over drafting a new driverless-car bill that the panel plans to craft soon.
The hiring surge comes amid signs of nervousness among the public about the safety of self-driving cars, even as the industry pushes for federal approval to push the technology onto more streets and highways. Half of U.S. adults think autonomous vehicles are more dangerous than human drivers, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. And safety advocates fear that the industry executives will use their government experience to undercut or soften proposed laws and rules.
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee subpanel with jurisdiction over autonomous vehicles, calls the revolving door trend among driverless car companies "worrisome.”
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“These former regulators have relationships with current regulators and have a deep knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of the agencies charged with ensuring the public safety,” she said in a statement to POLITICO. “Too often, such hires are there to help corporations work around regulations as opposed to improve compliance.”
The flurry of hires may be meant to signal the industry’s commitment to internalizing safety — but former NHTSA administrator and lifelong safety advocate Joan Claybrook worries that the ex-government officials’ primary mission will be to teach their new employers how to skirt regulations.
“It’s not as though they advise them on how to be a better company,” Claybrook said. “They’re saying who are the people we should talk to, who are the people we should avoid in the agency who are tough regulators, how can we frame a petition or proposal, who do we lobby not to have something apply to us.”
One congressional staffer disagreed, saying the companies are “looking to folks who know how to save lives.”
“This technology is posing really serious challenges that companies are grappling with, and a lot of the people you mentioned, those are safety experts,” said the staff member, who works for a lawmaker who has been heavily involved with crafting self-driving car legislation. “So if I’m a company who’s looking to tackle a serious challenge that’s going to take years and years and years to do, I’m going to hire somebody who is knowledgeable about safety.”
As for the risk of a brain drain, the staffer added, “these agencies are huge. A lot of the people you mentioned were heads of agencies; they’ve got people under them.”
None of the companies or former officials would agree to be interviewed by POLITICO.
Of course, the revolving door isn’t unique to the self-driving car industry. It has been a mainstay of the traditional automotive field, and just about every industry and agency engages in it. But the trend has been especially notable in the self-driving car arena in large part because so few people anywhere have a deep understanding of how autonomous driving systems work — and now activists worry that the industry will basically be able to write its own regulations.
The hiring spree, a key part of the industry’s effort to “build public understanding,” has allowed companies to swallow up some of the government’s most sophisticated experts on the emerging technology.
After a self-driving Uber vehicle killed a pedestrian in March 2018 outside Phoenix — the first known pedestrian death involving a driverless car — the company hired two of the federal government’s most high-profile safety experts to “advise us on our overall safety culture” and pursue the “safe and responsible introduction of self-driving to the Uber platform.” It was a pivotal time for Uber, which was making strides in cleaning up its "bad boy" image following the departure of CEO Travis Kalanick. The fatal crash threatened to undo all that progress and then some.
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Uber swiftly hired former NTSB Chairman Chris Hart to assist with what it called a "top-to-bottom safety review” of the company’s self-driving vehicles program and advise it on its safety culture. Several months later, Uber hired Nat Beuse away from NHTSA, where he had been in charge of vehicle safety research. After 12 years at the agency, Beuse’s technical expertise on driverless vehicle regulation and policy was virtually unparalleled at NHTSA.
Those were just two examples of the sheer number of safety advocates and transportation heavy-hitters that new-tech companies have snagged up.
Foxx, who led DOT from 2013 to 2017, is now chief policy officer and adviser to the co-founders at Lyft. Former NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind is the chief safety innovation officer at Zoox, a position that never existed before. Former NHTSA Chief Counsel Paul Hemmersbaugh served for two years as GM‘s chief counsel and public policy director.
Before joining Waymo, former NTSB Chairwoman Debbie Hersman was president and CEO of the National Safety Council, which receives substantial funding from the automotive industry. Days before starting at Waymo, Hersman and the council helped launch a new industry coalition encouraging public education on the benefits of driverless cars. Now she’s writing blog posts touting the company’s founding mission “to make our roads safer“ and its work “building the world’s most experienced driver.”
Megan Smith left Google’s self-driving car division in 2014 to become the White House chief technology officer under Obama. Phil Recht, a former NHTSA official from President Bill Clinton's administration, represented Google in its state lobbying efforts on self-driving cars. NHTSA deputy administrator, Ron Medford, left in 2012 to go to Google’s self-driving car division, now called Waymo, and still works there as director of safety.
The DOT, under both the Obama and Trump administrations, has taken a laissez-faire approach to regulating new driverless technology, making safety reporting voluntary and preferring the traditional self-certification regime to independent safety approval.
Strickland, who was Rosekind’s predecessor as NHTSA’s administrator, left the agency in 2013 for a lobbying gig at Venable, waited out the mandatory two-year “cooling off period” and started the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, quickly becoming the most prominent voice for the autonomous vehicle industry.
He didn’t have to wait at all to take on his new job at the Commerce Committee. Lobbyists coming to Congress, either as members or staff, have no cooling-off period.
One notable exception from the trend of self-driving companies hiring federal safety officials is Tesla. Despite several high-profile fatalities tied to its autopilot system, Tesla CEO Elon Musk does not appear to be vying for the halo effect of a top safety hire.
University of Michigan professor Erik Gordon, who specializes in technology commercialization, argued that this kind of cross-fertilization is a good thing.
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“What you really want in the beginning is people migrating back and forth,” he said. “There are things people … who work for government won’t know about for years that people who work for the autonomous vehicle developers do know. And vice versa.”
But so far, many more officials have followed Strickland out of government than back into it. University of South Carolina Law School professor Bryant Walker Smith, who specializes in emerging vehicle technology, said former agency officials can be key in helping companies navigate NHTSA’s “soft power” — the ability “to demand information, to initiate investigations, to make statements, to target one company for greater scrutiny than another.” These authorities may get less attention than NHTSA’s power to make regulations or initiate vehicle recalls, Smith said, but they can be even more significant.
Smith noted that low-level federal employees can bring nuts-and-bolts technical knowledge about policymaking, while senior officials can bring “a very astute understanding of the organization and its internal political dynamics.”
And some rare examples like Rosekind, who worked at NASA and the NTSB before becoming Obama’s first NHTSA administrator, have both.
Influence aside, lobbyist Greg Rodriguez of the law firm Best Best & Krieger said he worries about a brain drain.
“All the skills being sought after by the private sector are skills that will be needed for government to support the safe adoption of technologies like autonomous, and especially connected, vehicles,” he said.
Google and federal regulators have tended to have an especially close relationship when it comes to driverless cars. The Obama administration, for instance, took an innovation-friendly approach that sometimes translated into “regulators reaching out to Google asking them how to write the rules,” said Daniel Stevens, executive director of the Campaign for Accountability, a nonprofit watchdog group created by former members of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which maintains a "Google Transparency Project."
“Not only was Google happy to lobby federal officials directly, but then they got regulators at the Department of Transportation to call state officials to weigh in on self-driving rules in a way that would benefit Google,” Stevens said.
