NY Times, Mar. 31 2014 Carmakers’ Close Ties to Regulator Scrutinized By CHRISTOPHER JENSEN and MATTHEW L. WALD
There was nothing unusual about a letter with Jacqueline S. Glassman’s name on it discussing life-threatening safety defects and requiring more information from a manufacturer; Ms. Glassman was once chief counsel of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, then deputy administrator, and, briefly, acting administrator. But the letter this month was not from her, it was to her. Ms. Glassman left the agency in 2006 to join a top law firm, and her clients include Graco Children’s Products, which is refusing to recall almost 1.8 million child restraints that the safety agency says pose a hazard to infants. The letter to Ms. Glassman was demanding information about that refusal. Ms. Glassman is now a partner at Hogan Lovells, where her expertise is described as including counseling on “responding to government investigations.” She is among many former top N.H.T.S.A. officials who now represent companies they were once responsible for regulating, part of a well-established migration from regulator to the regulated in Washington. Ms. Glassman says she is simply bringing her expertise where it is needed. “Former government officials can help companies understand their legal responsibilities and what is expected of them,” she wrote in an email. “All of these situations are governed by the recusal and ethics rules that everyone is expected to follow. I’ve always strictly adhered to those rules.” But despite assurances like Ms. Glassman’s, the revolving door between the agency and the automotive industry is once again coming under scrutiny as lawmakers investigate the decade-long failure by General Motors and safety regulators to act more aggressively on a defective ignition switch that G.M. has linked to 13 deaths. When David J. Friedman, acting administrator of the highway safety agency, testifies before House and Senate panels on Tuesday and Wednesday, a central question will be why the agency failed to push for a recall. To critics, the agency’s failure to act is another example of how it is not as effective as it could be. One reason often cited is a shortage of investigators. Another is that former agency employees join law firms and help defend automakers and other companies being regulated. Those firms are buying “the intimate knowledge of how the agency works, the agency processes and procedures, the personalities at the agency,” said Allan J. Kam, a safety consultant based in Bethesda, Md., who worked at the safety agency for 25 years and retired as its senior enforcement attorney. That knowledge of how the agency works can “absolutely” make a difference when it comes to protecting consumers, said Joan Claybrook, who headed the agency from 1977 to 1981. Former agency employees know how to present information to maximize chances that it will limit a recall or even divert an investigation, she said, “and that is the harm because they are hired guns essentially.” The issue stirred enough concern that Barbara Boxer, one of the senators who will be questioning Mr. Friedman on Wednesday, introduced an unsuccessful bill in 2010 that would have barred the highway safety agency’s employees from working for an automaker for three years. Ms. Boxer, Democrat of California, said there appeared to be “an all-too-cozy relationship between former N.H.T.S.A. officials and the auto industry.” In a statement, the agency said, “The Obama administration has established the most rigorous ethics rules of any administration to close the revolving door on lobbyists and keep the interests of the American people first.” In addition, the statement said, “N.H.T.S.A. applies the regulations of the Office of Government Ethics to employees seeking employment outside the agency.” Other questions have been raised in the past, with inconclusive answers. One example involves Christopher Santucci, a former N.H.T.S.A. defect investigator who in 2003 went to work for Toyota, a company he had previously investigated. In a 2009 deposition in a wrongful-death lawsuit in Michigan, Mr. Santucci, one of a number of former agency officials who worked for Toyota at the time, acknowledged having discussions with colleagues still at the agency about their wide-ranging 2004 investigation into unintended acceleration involving nearly a million Toyotas from the 2003 and 2004 model years. The safety agency later said it would limit that investigation by excluding “longer duration events involving uncontrollable acceleration where brake pedal application allegedly has no effect.” It finally closed the investigation that year, saying it could not find a problem. It is normal and necessary for automakers to contact investigators on such cases, and there is no evidence of impropriety. But nothing in the agency’s investigative files details Mr. Santucci’s conversations. “Everything was off-the-record discussions between friends and former colleagues,” said Edgar F. Heiskell III, a West Virginia lawyer who filed the Michigan case, scheduled to go to trial in May. Mr. Santucci was not available for an interview and the automaker had no comment, a Toyota spokesman, Ed Lewis, said. Some consumer advocates argue that these discussions must be disclosed. “These meetings happen behind closed doors, there are no minutes of what is said,” said Clarence M. Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. “The line between industry and regulator gets blurred,” he added. Questions about the role of former safety officials working for the automakers arose in 2010 during a congressional investigation into the acceleration complaints on Toyota vehicles and how the agency handled that inquiry. That prompted a congressional request to the inspector general for the Transportation Department, its parent agency. Congress wanted to know whether former N.H.T.S.A. employees working for the automakers were “in a position to exert undue influence on N.H.T.S.A.’s safety defect investigations.” The inspector general reviewed the records of 63 employees who either left the safety agency to work for automakers or left automakers to work at the agency since 1984. It found “no evidence suggesting undue influence” and that the agency had “adequate controls” to assure compliance with ethics rules. But Ms. Claybrook, the former N.H.T.S.A. administrator, was not persuaded. “It is really hard to pinpoint how that influence system works,” she said. As associate administrator for enforcement at the safety agency, Michael Brownlee watched some of his colleagues move to new jobs, working for automakers. And, he said, sometimes they did get back in touch with defect investigators at the agency. “I don’t think they affected us one way or the other,” said Mr. Brownlee, who retired in 1997. “The auto companies thought their ex-N.H.T.S.A. employees much more effective than did we in the agency.” Not far from Ms. Glassman’s office at Hogan Lovells, another former N.H.T.S.A. official — David L. Strickland — has been settling into his new job as a partner at the law firm Venable. In January, Mr. Strickland stepped down as head of the safety agency. Venable describes Mr. Strickland’s expertise as including regulatory issues, an area in which the firm says it specializes. Mr. Strickland became administrator of the highway safety agency in 2010. His most controversial action was allowing Chrysler to install trailer hitches as a means to protect gas tanks that the agency had concluded were prone to fires when hit from behind. The Chrysler recall covered 1.6 million of its 1993-98 Jeep Grand Cherokees and 2002-7 Jeep Liberty models. As part of that action, Mr. Strickland also approved dropping the agency’s demand to recall an additional 1.1 million 1999-2004 Grand Cherokees it had originally argued were dangerous. The agency linked 51 fire deaths to the defect. The agency has yet to say whether it conducted any tests to demonstrate that such a method would protect consumers, and Mr. Strickland’s decision to join a law firm that has worked for Chrysler has fueled skepticism. Mr. Strickland’s last day at the agency was Jan. 17, the day the agency confirmed it had approved the trailer-hitch remedy. “The moment Strickland began discussing a future job with Venable, he should have publicly recused himself from anything involving the Chrysler investigation and he should have put that on the record,” said Mr. Ditlow, of the Center for Auto Safety. Mr. Strickland declined to be interviewed for this article. Some former officials, including Ms. Glassman, say there are enough rules and restrictions in place to address any concerns. Those rules include an executive order issued in 2009 by President Obama requiring his appointees to agree to a two-year no-contact period. Mr. Brownlee, the safety agency’s former associate administrator, declined to criticize those who have left the agency to work for automakers or the law firms that represent them. “These are honorable people,” he said. Still, he acknowledged: “The imagery of that many people going to work very quickly for the auto industry does leave a rather bad taste in the public’s mouth.” _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
