In February, Elon’s Musketeers at President Trump’s cost-trimming DOGE operation turned up at the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which regulates the kinds of self-driving cars the billionaire wants to build.
DOGE promptly culled four percent of the federal watchdog’s staff.
The transport safety agency, NHTSA, issued no fewer than 50 recall notices for the Tesla tycoon’s cars between 2021 and 2024. Some described simple issues Tesla could fix with an over-the-air software update. Others, such as bodywork falling off Cybertrucks, required a physical recall.
NHTSA and Tesla have also beefed over the automaker’s “full self-driving” mode for its vehicles, which critics say is nothing of the sort.
It’s now been reported that the sackings at NHTSA disproportionately targeted staff whose jobs involved regulating self-driving cars, and even some senior Tesla staff think that was a bad idea.
“Letting DOGE fire those in the autonomous division is sheer madness — we should be lobbying to add people to NHTSA,” one manager at Tesla told the Financial Times.
The watchdog proposed at the end of last year a national framework for testing and overseeing the safety and abilities of autonomous vehicles, like the ones Tesla wants to make and sell and even operate as Waymo-style fleets of driver-less robo-taxis.
The quoted manager said the regulator needs to finish up and publish that framework, giving manufacturers a clear view of the regulatory hurdles they need to clear in the autonomous space, or Tesla “doesn’t have a prayer” for scaling up its self-driving ambitions. Layoffs at NHTSA could set back or water down that framework.
Musk is betting heavily on driver-less cars and taxis: In October 2024 he unveiled a mock-up of a Cybercab, and promised it would be on the road by 2027. Now the world’s richest man, who oversees the White House’s DOGE unit that has been pushing cut-backs across the federal government, has the whip hand over the agency that can grant permission for his robo-cabs to hit the road.
“Musk has attacked the Federal Aviation Administration and Federal Communications Commission to benefit SpaceX,” a former top official at the regulator reportedly said. “Why would he spare NHTSA?”
FSD has a poor track record
One reason to reduce NHTSA’s ability to assess Tesla’s autonomous driving software is that it does not bear up to scrutiny.
Dan O’Dowd, founder of Green Hills Software, set up The Dawn Project to track Tesla. So far, the project has used NHTSA data to list 46 deaths and 1,932 injuries involving FSD-controlled vehicles. The project took out a full-page ad in the New York Times and ran a commercial during the Superbowl to highlight its findings.
“The car is terrible, it will try to kill you,” O’Dowd told The Register. “We’ve written multiple reports to NHTSA to show it. We’ve offered to help. They want to reproduce it, and we show them how to do it. And nothing happens, not a thing. No investigation, no improvement, no fixing of the problem.”
One major problem with the FSD design, he opined, is that it is the only self-driving vehicle system in production that doesn’t use light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors to scan the road and build a 3D map of the scene.
Musk isn’t keen on LiDAR, preferring to rely on less-expensive radar and cameras, which can be fooled in amusing ways, to control its vehicles.
O’Dowd told us he’s not optimistic about any future scrutiny, as the falling headcount at NHTSA could mean it becomes less capable.
“Elon has done a lot of really interesting things with tech that were thought to be impossible,” as one former top NHTSA official put it to the FT.
“What concerns me is that Tesla is not known for taking a slow and methodical approach, they move fast and break things and people are at risk because of that. There have been preventable deaths, so it’s an immediate concern for us.”
DOGE audit in the offing
Whatever DOGE is doing at NHTSA and elsewhere, its deeds are now under the microscope of Uncle Sam’s Government Accounting Office (GAO).
It’s said an audit into the team began in March and is focusing on DOGE’s adherence to data protection and privacy rules, specifically the “potential or actual misuse of agency systems or data.”
The GAO probe is apparently reviewing DOGE’s activities at the Departments of Labor, Education, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services, as well as at the Treasury and the Social Security Administration.
“GAO has received requests to review actions taken by DOGE across multiple agencies,” Sarah Kaczmarek, a spokesperson for the GAO, told WiReD magazine.
“The first thing GAO does as any work begins is to determine the full scope of what we will cover and the methodology to be used. Until that is done, we cannot provide any additional details or estimates on when the work will be completed.”
In addition, investigators will examine the IT system permissions and privileges DOGE obtained or gained, and the security of the computer equipment it is using. The results of the investigation are due within weeks.
The GAO probe won’t consider DOGE’s finances. The org’s books are matter of interest in light of a separate report that claims DOGE drew up a $1.3 million invoice for Uncle Sam to cover salaries after hunting through the Department of Labor for costs to recommend cutting.
If true, that’s odd as when Musk recruited for DOGE operatives he called for volunteers.
One reassuring side of the WiReD report on the Department of Labor’s interaction with DOGE is that the Musketeers were only able to read info from the department’s servers.
“So far they do not have write access,” internal DoL meeting notes state. “They have asked; we’ve held them at bay. We’ve tried to get them to tell us what they want & then we do it. They only have read access.” ®
