Like many federal agencies, the Department of Transportation (DOT) uses advisory committees, primarily to help draft safety regulations for the freight rail, passenger rail, and trucking industries. The panels are composed of experts in the field and key stakeholders for both industry and its workers.
And now they’ve all been fired.
The Trump administration is reconstituting all DOT advisory committees to align the membership with its policy goals. Rebuilding the committees from the ground up could take months.
In a statement provided to the Prospect, a DOT spokesperson claimed the panels “are long overdue for a refresh,” adding they “have lost sight of the mission” and are “overrun with individuals whose sole focus is their radical DEI and climate agenda.” The agency’s main contention? Some committees “have not held a single meeting in over a year, while others have not produced recommendations or advisory reports.”
Transportation Trades Division, AFL-CIO (TTD), the largest transportation labor federation in the U.S., contends this blame is misplaced.
“You need to actually have meetings,” TTD president Greg Regan told the Prospect. “The agency has to set the agenda, call the meetings, and ask for input.”
It has been ten months since the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) convened its Railroad Safety Advisory Committee (RSAC), which typically meets biannually. Since its inception in 1996, the committee has served as a venue for collaborative rulemaking around rail safety; RSAC consisted of 51 voting members from 26 stakeholder organizations. It is one of many committees established under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or FACA, which mandates public meetings and advance notice via the Federal Register. FACA panels advise and make recommendations to the federal government on all sorts of issues, shaping regulation beyond the public comment process.
On August 13, FRA acting administrator Drew Feeley sent termination notices to all of RSAC’s members, including representatives from several unions within TTD. More than a dozen representatives from the labor federation serve on transportation advisory committees, or at least they did until last week.
“Safety is a fundamental responsibility of DOT’s modal agencies, and it’s crucial that workers who are affected by safety issues are provided with a voice on these committees,” TTD said in a statement. “During the last year, many modal agencies have failed to schedule committee meetings, creating a backlog in timely meetings that is now exacerbated by the termination of all committee members.”
It has been ten months since the Federal Railroad Administration convened its Railroad Safety Advisory Committee, which typically meets biannually.
Roy Morrison, safety director at the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division (BMWED), had served on RSAC since 2017. In an interview with the Prospect, he explained that the biannual meetings are functionally “the last step” in the rule- and policymaking process: “All the work is really done in the working groups.” RSAC had eight working groups covering a wide range of safety issues, but their work has been at a standstill.
“There’s been a lack of engagement from the FRA,” Michael Baldwin, president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen (BRS), told the Prospect. “It’s been pretty quiet, and I’d say nonfunctioning for at least a year.”
Baldwin noted that the lack of meetings can be partly attributed to working-group parties failing to reach a consensus on certain issues, but he said FRA’s disengagement and “the turmoil that is being experienced within all federal agencies right now” are mostly to blame for putting the panel’s safety recommendations on ice.
The mass—albeit temporary—disbanding of advisory committees could give a leg up to industry. In recent years, the American Association of Railroads (AAR), the lead trade group for the freight rail industry, successfully pressured FRA to scrap regulations requiring technologically advanced brakes capable of stopping a train faster than traditional braking systems. The train that derailed in the East Palestine, Ohio, disaster was not equipped with such brakes, and wayside detectors failed to accurately measure the overheated wheel bearing that caused the derailment in time for the crew members to take corrective action.
The RSAC working group on wayside detectors has not met since February 2024.
DOT did not provide a timeline for reconstituting its various committees. Baldwin told the Prospect he expects RSAC’s “window of inactivity” to persist, primarily because FRA will need to conduct background checks on prospective committee members. “I’ve seen that take up to six months,” he said, recalling when FRA allowed the committee’s charter to expire during President Trump’s first term. (It was rechartered in November 2021.)
Following the passage of the Rail Safety Improvement Act in 2008, RSAC formed several working groups to remedy outstanding safety issues. But these working groups have remained in limbo since the committee’s last full meeting in October 2024.
“There are items out of that act that have not been addressed yet, and we’re in 2025,” Baldwin told the Prospect. “If the group doesn’t work toward this, the FRA can go back to their office and write a regulation without any input from any other entity, except for a [public] comment period.”
FRA has waived public comment before, most recently on July 1 when it published a list of deregulatory actions, many of which were also not subject to the collaborative rulemaking process.
FACA STATES THAT MEMBERSHIP among committees advising the federal government “must be fairly balanced.” For its part, RSAC represented “everybody who had a stake,” Morrison said, describing the committee’s membership as a “really good mix” of people representing the interests of labor, industry, suppliers, manufacturers, and regulators, among others. Labor representatives who previously served on the committee, including maintenance-of-way employees, signal maintainers, and rail workers with expertise in other crafts, all had a seat at the table. “We were really making progress, and then it just came to a grinding halt,” he told the Prospect.
Although Morrison and Baldwin expect RSAC to restore membership to representatives from labor groups, the extent to which rail workers will be able to meaningfully participate in the collaborative rulemaking process remains an open question. “This committee has been built to where one group can’t outvote or outweigh the other,” Baldwin said. “They may rebuild it to look just like it does today, but they can shift the number of seats you have.” Whether rail workers of all stripes will retain their current voting power remains unclear, as is the number of seats industry could gain going forward.
TTD has urged the Transportation Department to bring all labor representatives back into the fold, emphasizing the need for input from workers who are not only affected by safety issues, but have a “direct stake in improving safety across the transportation sector and serve as an important counterweight on many committees dominated by industry representatives.” One such committee is the USDOT Advisory Board, which as Regan observed, does not count labor representatives among its members.
The decision to reconstitute RSAC comes at a time when cost-cutting and consolidation in freight rail has reached a boiling point. As my colleague David Dayen points out, the potential $85 billion merger between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern, as well as the rumored amalgamation of BNSF and CSX, would do much damage to competitive markets. The mega-merger talks prompted Railroad Workers United (RWU) to adopt a resolution earlier this month opposing further consolidation in the industry. RWU argued that such mega-mergers would undermine the stability of the supply chain at the expense of rail workers and trackside communities alike.
“What we’re seeing is almost a full-frontal assault to dismantle almost everything that labor has been able to win over the course of the last century,” Ron Kaminkow, a trustee at RWU and former brakeman, conductor, and engineer, told the Prospect. “To end up with two railroads in the United States and only four in the total of North America, this is something that the robber barons of old could only dream about.”
Kaminkow cast doubt on the railroads’ approach to safety, which he asserted is often accompanied by a cost-benefit analysis rather than thoughtful consideration of the dangers in railroading. Their track records do not inspire confidence. Union Pacific reportedly meddled in a federal safety audit last year, and Trump’s pick to run the FRA is preceded by his not-so-sterling reputation of fostering a culture of retaliation at the railroad he served as president of before its acquisition by CSX. But the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine stands as perhaps the most glaring episode feeding railroads’ negative public image.
“It seems lost on FRA and industry that no derailment is an achievable goal,” Morrison told the Prospect. “We average three major derailments a day in the United States, and that’s not OK.”