Kris Holt joined Engadget as a contributing reporter on the news desk in 2018. He has been writing about technology, games, streaming and entertainment for over a decade after starting his career as a sub-editor on a local newspaper. Kris holds a Master of Arts degree in English from the University of Dundee.
has been swinging through the federal government over the last few weeks, with his Department of Government Efficiency chopping down budgets andat a number of agencies. Among those affected is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration , which is said to be losing about 10 percent of its relatively small headcount through buyouts and firings., between 70 and 80 people are departing the agency, which is responsible for road safety in the US.
The DOGE cull also impacted three people from a very small team that was working on the safety of autonomous vehicles, such as those from Alphabet’s Waymo, Amazon’s Zoox and — hey, look at that! — Elon Musk's Tesla. It's probably just a coincidence that an organization headed by the same person who is CEO of a prominent company that's working on self-driving cars has cut federal employees that are evaluating the safety of such technology. Probably.
The NHTSA expanded from around 600 workers to 800 or so during the Biden administration. The autonomous vehicle oversight team was formed as part of that growth. Since several of its seven or so members were new to the federal government, their employment status was at risk due to a DOGE initiative to cull probationary employees from the federal workforce, asnotes.
Musk and President Donald Trump pledged in an interview this week that the former, who has been designated as a"special government employee," wouldn't be involved in decisions that would mark a conflict of interest with his businesses.of an investigation into 14 deaths linked to driver misuse of the company's Autopilot feature. Last month, Musk said that Tesla will roll out a
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Department Of Government Efficiency NHTSA The Federal Government Autonomous Vehicles
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