By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. auto safety agency is shedding more than 25% of its employees under financial incentive programs to depart the government offered by the Trump administration, according to data provided to Congress seen by Reuters.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the Transportation Department, is shrinking from 772 employees as of May 31 to 555 under the program. The Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transit Administration are also both losing more than 25% of their staff.
Representative Rick Larsen, top Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, expressed concerns about the cuts, questioning how USDOT can “expedite project delivery and advance safety with a decimated workforce.”
Overall, USDOT is losing just over 4,100 employees, dropping from nearly 57,000 to 52,862, with the Federal Aviation Administration shedding 2,137 workers and falling from about 46,250 to 44,208.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told reporters on Thursday it was uncertain if the department would conduct layoffs.
“If we have bloat in certain areas we’ll reduce force,” Duffy said, adding the department would rehire back into some areas if needed. “We feel good where we’re at right now, but we’ll continue to assess where we’re at with our staffing needs.”
Duffy has said the department did not cut any safety-critical employees and is actively seeking to add air traffic controllers.
Upon taking office in January, President Donald Trump launched a campaign to overhaul the 2.3 million-strong federal civilian workforce, led by billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency.
By late April, about 100 days into the effort, the government overhaul had resulted in the firing, resignations and early retirements of 260,000 civil servants, according to a Reuters tally.
NHTSA has a number of ongoing investigations into advanced driver assistance systems and self-driving vehicles involving Tesla, Alphabet’s Waymo and other companies.
The agency said in February it had grown by 30% under former President Joe Biden.
Consumer advocacy groups on Thursday urged lawmakers to drop proposed cuts to NHTSA’s budget, including cutting its operations and research account by over $10 million, saying it would harm “the agency’s ability to conduct rulemaking, enforcement actions, and research and analysis.”
It would also cut nearly $78 million of supplemental funds from the $1 billion 2021 infrastructure law. Groups said they were “particularly concerned that such funding cuts may lead to further firings or forced retirements, which have decimated NHTSA.”
(Reporting by David Shepardson and Courtney Rozen; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Aurora Ellis and Nia Williams)
