I’d like to see an overhaul of the current federal guidelines for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of safety countermeasures. And it probably needs to start with an Executive Order. Without such a decisive action, we are likely to see a continuation of compromise which will pile up more senseless and preventable traffic-related deaths.
In the aftermath of a horrific truck crash on May 4, 2013, which I survived, I discovered that the major factor which stole my daughters’ lives — underride — was, is, and probably will continue to be woefully underreported. In fact, recent searching, of the NHTSA Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) files on truck crashes, has revealed the shocking extent of the agency’s failure to record underride deaths as such. Yet, the known-to-be-undercounted data on underride deaths is heavily factored into the formula for underride regulatory analysis.
Executive Order 12866, issued by President Clinton in 1993, sets out the requirements for approval of new federal rules by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which is a part of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Circular A-4 spells out the specific guidelines for federal agencies to follow when preparing regulatory analysis.
Order 12866 requires agencies to conduct an analysis of the benefits and costs of rules and, to the extent permitted by law, directs that regulatory action shall only proceed on the basis of a reasoned determination that the benefits of a regulation justify the costs. President Obama issued Executive Order 13563 “Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review,” on January 18, 2011, to reaffirm and supplement Executive Order 12866 to further improve rulemaking and regulatory review. About OIRA
Of great relevance is a recent article in The New Republic by Timothy Noah, May God Save Us From Economists. Noah starts his piece out by describing the gruesome underride death of actress Jayne Mansfield on June 29, 1967, and then he says this:
The federal government took 28 years and three months to get its underride guard rule out the door. By then, nearly 9,000 more people had died the same way Mansfield had, by sliding under a big semi.
Why was three decades’ deliberation necessary to impose such a commonsense safety precaution? Because Mansfield met her fate just as the economics profession was advancing, like an occupying army, into noneconomic agencies of the federal government. The result was a mindset—an ideology, really—that dominates public policymaking to this day. The Marxists (of whom I am not one) have an excellent term for this ideology: Economism. At a time of extreme political polarization, an Economicist bias (pronounced eh-co-nom-i-sist) is practically the only belief that Democrats and Republicans share.
Brilliant observation. Of course, the stranglehold on underride rulemaking is much worse than he realizes (and I told him so via Twitter).
Noah follows that opening with a very lengthy discussion of how this mindset has affected many issues we face today. Then he closes off his comments by returning to the topic of underride:
Because Economism is out of control. Those Mansfield bars? In 2015, NHTSA proposed a regulation requiring that underride guards meet a higher standard of strength and energy absorption, because every year more than 200 people die, on average, the same way Jayne Mansfield did more than half a century ago. Still. The final rule came out this past July, but only after New York Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand inserted into the infrastructure bill language telling NHTSA to get off the dime.
It’s progress of a sort to wait seven years for a safety regulation instead of 28 years, and 1,400 deaths is fewer than 9,000. But when the new regulation was finally published, Joan Claybrook, who was NHTSA administrator in the 1970s, said it was wholly inadequate—“an affront to the families of underride victims.” Other safety advocates seemed to agree. Why wasn’t the Mansfield bar rule stronger? Because, the economists tell us, a human life is worth only so much.
Where will we go from here? Can we hope that the present Administration will issue a new Executive Order that takes a different approach to regulatory analysis? Or should we plan on more of the same — somebody getting away with murder? Rest assured, countless lives depend on this.
Delivery of a Vision Zero Petition to Washington; What I have learned in our battle for safer roads
