Who’s Watching Out for Safety?

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has contributed during its 30-year life to a declining rate of carnage on America’s highways. But the agency’s record on vehicle rollovers will not make the highlight reel.

Every year, about 9,000 deaths and 60,000 serious injuries result from “first event” rollover accidents, in which vehicles flip over without hitting other cars. Compact sport-utility vehicles and small pickups, with their high centers of gravity and narrow tracks, have been the worst offenders in these accidents, which are responsible for more than one in five highway fatalities.

Yet despite several attempts since 1973, NHTSA has failed to take action on rollovers, allowing manufacturers to continue to build vehicles, from a rollover standpoint, any way they choose. Various proposed standards have been rejected on grounds they don’t adequately predict real-world vehicle handling or might take whole classes of vehicles off the market.

At the same time, NHTSA has rejected a slew of petitions to declare particular models defective due to rollover risk, reasoning that because these models are more or less equally unstable, it would be wrong to stigmatize any one of them.

Not that NHTSA has given up. Its latest research may soon result in a proposed standardized test that would not regulate rollovers, but would give consumer information on which vehicles are most apt to flip over. Even this is likely to encounter industry opposition and may not be adopted.

NHTSA’s tradition of inaction has not saved manufacturers from a wave of rollover lawsuits targeting such models as the Ford Bronco II and Suzuki Samurai. While paying settlements in hundreds of these cases, manufacturers have had some success in others by invoking the “NHTSA defense,” the argument that government experts, after careful consideration, decided not to regulate their vehicles, which are therefore safe.

To drive home the point, the companies often tap former senior NHTSA officials for lucrative service as expert witnesses.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers and auto safety groups say such arrangements are unseemly and part of a wider “revolving door” pattern of agency officials joining the ranks of those they once regulated to make serious money from their contacts and expertise. In recent years, more than a dozen top NHTSA officials have taken jobs with auto makers or their trade groups, or have become industry consultants or expert witnesses, documents and interviews show.

Critics say the pattern casts a cloud over agency decision-making on rollovers and other controversies, suggesting that the prospect of a big payday may have caused some officials to pull their punches.

“You’ll never prove it, but you show me somebody who’s playing hardball . . . and ask yourself whether they’re ever going to be hired as a consultant at $250 per hour,” said W. Randolph Barnhart, a Denver lawyer involved in auto safety litigation. “It’s just human nature.”

*

NHTSA defenders, including current and former agency officials, say such suspicions are groundless and profoundly unfair.

“It’s insulting,” NHTSA spokesman Tim Hurd said. Agency employees “take a financial hit in working with the government, but it’s made up in part by the idea that you’re serving some ideals and you’re working for the public.”

Yet the pattern has created problems of image if not substance. To counteract defense claims that their vehicles meet NHTSA standards, plaintiffs routinely portray the agency as captive of an industry that uses its leverage--including its hiring power--to keep such standards weak.

Moreover, plaintiffs are increasingly invoking government ethics regulations to challenge the right of former agency officials to testify. These regulations bar former NHTSA officials from discussing decisions in which they were personally involved. In some instances, courts have agreed to prohibit the testimony. In others, auto makers, rather than fight the challenge, decided not to call the officials to the stand.

Two former heads of NHTSA and at least four former chief counsels are among those who have gone on to serve the industry.

NHTSA Administrator Diane K. Steed, for example, left the agency in 1989 and immediately became a prominent advocate and consultant for the industry. She currently serves as president of the Coalition for Vehicle Choice, an industry group, and as partner in a lobbying and public relations firm that works extensively for auto makers.

Steed’s successor as NHTSA administrator, Jerry R. Curry, a retired Army general, became a leading expert witness for auto makers after leaving the agency in 1992. Curry, who has testified at various times for Ford, Chrysler, Nissan, Suzuki and Hyundai, said critics are slinging mud in the “hope some of it will stick.”

However, after earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees from Ford as a consultant and expert witness in Bronco II lawsuits, Curry was eventually knocked out of those cases by plaintiffs’ lawyers’ complaints to NHTSA.

In 1997, agency lawyers advised Curry that his work in Bronco II cases might be improper because he had approved the agency’s decision in 1990 to close a Bronco II rollover probe. According to a NHTSA memo, a delegation of Ford lawyers descended on the agency to discuss the Curry situation. The delegation included Erika Z. Jones and Paul Jackson Rice, both former NHTSA chief counsels.

Curry, who wound up swearing off future Bronco II cases, said the decision was his. Plaintiffs “felt that my testimony was so debilitating to their cases . . . that they complained at some length to NHTSA about it,” Curry said. “I said I don’t need the grief . . . of having to fight . . . with all these folks.”

The loss of Curry did not leave Ford without options, however. William Boehly, a former NHTSA enforcement chief and associate administrator, has become Ford’s Bronco II witness du jour.

Boehly, who is also vice president for safety at the Assn. of International Automobile Manufacturers, said his Bronco II testimony is limited to explaining how NHTSA goes about its work.

“I don’t see anything wrong with expressing factually what our government has done,” he said.

Besides, Boehly said, critics “don’t seem to mind when other former employees testify for plaintiffs.”

*

Indeed, NHTSA alums sometimes wind up as experts on the other side. Exhibit A: Michael Brownlee, a former associate administrator, in the last year has testified for accident victims in several cases that auto makers improperly withheld safety data from NHTSA.

And former Administrator Joan Claybrook has remained a staunch critic of the auto makers. Claybrook, an ally of Ralph Nader, ran the agency during the Carter administration and is now president of the consumer group Public Citizen.

Boehly and others say it’s hogwash to think NHTSA officials deliberately pull their punches.

“When you work at NHTSA or anywhere in the government, you take an oath,” said one former senior official who is now an executive with a major auto maker. “I don’t know of anyone in NHTSA who’s thinking, ‘I have to make a decision this way’ ” to appease the industry.

Besides, he said, NHTSA officials have the same right as anyone to earn a living and apply their know-how to nongovernmental work.

“What would you want them to do,” he asked, “put on a funny hat and say, ‘Would you like fries with these?’ ”

But critics say the culture and psychology of the agency must be affected, even if subtly, by the lucrative opportunities some officials have enjoyed.

If “some civil servant wants to . . . put [his] kids through college at today’s prices . . . there’s a path that’s pretty clearly laid out,” said Thomas J. Feaheny, a former engineering vice president at Ford who left the firm in the ‘80s. “If you want to [work for the auto makers], you’re going to be a little cautious about coming down real hard.”

*

Times staff writer Myron Levin can be reached at myron.levin@latimes.com.