The Struggle for Auto Safety - by Jerry L Mashaw & David L Harfst (Hardcover)

About the Book

Combining superb investigative reporting with incisive analysis, Jerry Mashaw and David Harfst provide a compelling account of the attempt to regulate auto safety in America. Their penetrating look inside the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) spans two decades and reveals the complexities of regulating risk in a free society.

Book Synopsis

Combining superb investigative reporting with incisive analysis, Jerry Mashaw and David Harfst provide a compelling account of the attempt to regulate auto safety in America. Their penetrating look inside the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) spans two decades and reveals the complexities of regulating risk in a free society.

Hoping to stem the tide of rising automobile deaths and injuries, Congress passed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966. From that point on, automakers would build cars under the watchful eyes of the federal regulators at NHTSA. Curiously, however, the agency abandoned its safety mission of setting, monitoring, and enforcing performance standards in favor of the largely symbolic act of recalling defective autos.

Mashaw and Harfst argue that the regulatory shift from rules to recalls was neither a response to a new vision of the public interest nor a result of pressure by the auto industry or other interest groups. Instead, the culprit was the legal environment surrounding NHTSA and other regulatory agencies such as the EPA, OSHA, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The authors show how NHTSA's decisions as well as its organization, processes, and personnel were reoriented in order to comply with the demands of a legal culture that proved surprisingly resistant to regulatory pressures.

This broad-gauged view of NHTSA has much to say about political idealism and personal ambition, scientific commitment and professional competition, long-range vision and political opportunism. A fascinating illustration of America's ambivalence over whether government is a source of--or solution to--social ills, The Struggle for Auto Safety offers important lessons about the design and management of effective health and safety regulatory agencies today.

Review Quotes

Jerry Mashaw has established himself among our most profound and insightful observers of the agencies that do the daily work of regulation. He and David Harfst, a Washington lawyer, examine the quarter-century struggle that brought us from tail fins to airbags. It is at once a story about the impact of individuals in a particular time and place, holding strong ideas about the need for auto safety, and an account of the needs and influences of the larger institutions and social structures within which change is sought. In charting the transformation of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration from safety innovator to reactive consumer protector, this brilliant book reveals more about the regulatory process and its responsiveness to our complex desires than Americans may wish to know.

This book touches on virtually every analytical and philosophical issue I know of in the fields of public policy and management. By way of a captivating case study of twenty-five years of motor vehicle safety regulation, readers of all kinds can learn about public-agenda setting, legislative policy development, agency capacity-building, political oversight, interest group power, and judicial review of administrative actions. Mashaw and Harfst also show how struggles among competing visions of the good society are played out in America. The Struggle for Auto Safety is a must-read for public policy students and scholars.

Mashaw and Harfst have produced a brilliantly crafted analysis of regulatory dreams and regulatory failure. They demonstrate how American legal culture, enforced by judicial review, gradually reshaped regulatory strategy, limiting legislative and administrative efforts to revolutionize automotive design. The Struggle for Auto Safety should become a landmark in the study of regulatory politics.

About the Author

Mashaw Jerry L.:

Jerry L. Mashaw is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale UniversityHarfst David L.:

David L. Harfst is an attorney in Washington, D.C.