DETROIT (AP) – Mark Rosekind is a nationally known expert in human fatigue. He may soon inherit a government agency that’s been criticized for being asleep at the wheel.
President Obama on Wednesday nominated Rosekind, a National Transportation Safety Board member and a former NASA scientist with a Ph.D from Yale, to be the U.S. government’s top auto safety regulator, pending Senate confirmation.
Rosekind has several years of safety experience, and helped to investigate seven major transportation accidents. Now he’ll step into the leadership of The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a neglected but critically important agency that is widely considered to be understaffed and underfunded. And, due to two prominent recent safety crises, it’s considered too slow to move and too cozy with the car companies it regulates.
The agency has been without a permanent administrator for nearly a year, and during that time, has been vilified by lawmakers for its tardy reaction to a deadly ignition switch problem at General Motors dating back a decade and problems with air bags made by Takata Corp. that the agency also knew about for years.
It’s also become clear that the agency’s staff lacks expertise in complex car systems such as ignitions and air bags. Lawmakers are now worried the regulators haven’t kept pace as the auto industry moves toward an even more sophisticated technology: the self-driving car.