Government bureaucrats are adept at turning their mismanagement into excuses that they lack sufficient authority or don't have enough funds -- and that more of each are needed to avoid future fiascoes. Critics say officials of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are embarked on just such a ploy in the wake of the Ford-Firestone tire debacle.

NHTSA was warned as early as July 1998 about the possibility of a problem with Firestone tires -- but failed to act. NHTSA didn't think a series of alerts from a State Farm auto-insurance analyst indicated a potential defect. Critics charge this is not the first time the agency has been asleep at the wheel.

• Even after a federal court in 1978 overturned a NHTSA truck brake standard because it made trucking "even more hazardous," the agency persisted with it despite mounting evidence of widespread malfunctions.

• A General Accounting Office report established that NHTSA's airbag mandate, which has so far resulted in the deaths of 99 children, ignored evidence of a hazard to them -- and that NHTSA failed to immediately warn the public because of "the potential for bad press."

• In May, NHTSA mandated even more complex air bags to fix the problems of its first rule -- but there is no real-world evidence these "advanced" air bags will perform any better.

• Finally, there is the agency's CAFE program to increase average fuel efficiency -- which resulted in lighter-weight cars less able to withstand crashes.

According to one peer-reviewed study, CAFE increases accident deaths by 2,000 to 4,000 annually -- dwarfing the number of fatalities due to separation of tread on Firestone tires.

Source: Sam Kazman (Competitive Enterprise Institute), "Punish Ford-Firestone, But Don't Reward NHTSA," Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2000.

For text (WSJ subscription) http://online.wsj.com/articles
/SB968725410565152430.htm