Federal Reforms Seen in Wake of Tire Recall
The new head of the federal government’s highway safety agency said Friday that the Firestone tire debacle shows that self-regulation in the auto industry can leave consumers exposed to danger.
“I think it would be very hard for anyone reasonable not to understand that the manufacturers’ self-policing did not work in this case,” Sue Bailey, who took over at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration about two weeks into the Firestone recall, said in a session with reporters.
Bailey’s remarks challenge the decades-old federal policy that delegates much of the responsibility for automobile safety to the industry itself.
Bailey added that “this is exactly the right time” to ask Congress for greater powers and more funding. Acknowledging widespread opposition to broadening the reach of federal regulators, she said that, nonetheless, “I for one think when it comes to safety, you can’t have too much control.”
Bailey said she will directly order reforms at NHTSA, which has been heavily criticized for failing to spot the tire failure trend. She said the agency needs to collect more information on potential defects, do a smarter job of analyzing the data it already possesses, set clear procedures for responding to emerging hazards and update safety standards that are decades old in some cases.
She also said the Transportation Department will redouble efforts to win congressional approval for a $100-million increase in NHTSA’s budget for safety regulation and research--a 60% increase.
State Farm Insurance had warned NHTSA beginning in 1998 of a potential problem with Firestone tires. But the tip went nowhere. The agency finally began an investigation this May.
“We didn’t know enough and we didn’t know soon enough,” Bailey said.
On Aug. 9, Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. voluntarily recalled 6.5 million tires used mainly on Ford Explorers because their treads could peel off, causing deadly accidents. On Aug. 21, Bailey arrived at NHTSA from the Pentagon, where she had headed the military’s health programs.
Bailey indicated she expects to remain in charge of NHTSA if Vice President Al Gore is elected president in November.
An osteopathic physician, health policy expert and Navy veteran, Bailey recently has been involved in another headline-making controversy: defending the military’s anthrax vaccine against critics who consider it unsafe.
She spent Wednesday being questioned on Capitol Hill and faces more interviews Tuesday before Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). Saying he wants to avoid a blame game, the Republican lawmaker will focus on reforms to improve consumer protection. Bailey said she would provide more detail on her plans at the hearing.
With about 600 employees, NHTSA is regarded as the world’s most advanced road safety agency. It sets minimum safety standards for vehicles, watches out for product defects and helps shape national policy concerning issues from drunk driving to cellular phone use in cars.
But critics in consumer groups contend that NHTSA has gone soft, and cite as an example its failure to respond to the early warnings from State Farm. The agency seems unable to handle more than one major issue at a time, critics add. Many of its safety standards--including those for tires--have not been revised since the 1970s. Privately, auto industry officials acknowledge that NHTSA often is no match for their engineers, lawyers and lobbyists.
Consumers Union technical director R. David Pittle told Congress last week that NHTSA is “obviously an agency that has lost its will and lost its way.” But he went on to say that Bailey “brings fresh leadership and an impressive set of credentials to put the spirit of service to the consumer back in the agency.”
Bailey has shown her willingness to take decisive steps at NHTSA. Two weeks ago, after Firestone refused to recall an additional 1.4 million tires that NHTSA concluded also were susceptible to failure, she ordered a warning be issued to consumers.
While insisting that NHTSA simply did not have enough information to open the Firestone investigation any earlier than it did, Bailey said she understood the critics’ frustration.
“We certainly should have a way to make better use of the information that is there,” she said.
Bailey also said that NHTSA’s sprawling databases of highway accidents need to be modernized so more information can be collected and trends identified more easily.
And she agreed that tire safety standards that predate the age of radials and the return to higher speed limits on U.S. roads are of questionable value.
“We shouldn’t have a 30-year-old standard,” she said. “Absolutely. This is ridiculous. We need to change the standards.”
Ford maintains that its efforts to respond to customer concerns ultimately helped uncover the problem with the tires, while Firestone has underscored that its recall is voluntary and no defect in its tires has yet been identified.
Ford Chief Executive Jac Nasser promised Congress this week that he would help develop an industrywide early warning system to identify potential safety problems and share the information with the government.
* UNSEEN WARNINGS
Product safety concerns aired in other countries don’t always reach the United States. C1
