Hey, DOGE Team, Why Do We Need NHTSA Crash Testing Cars if IIHS Does It Better and At No Expense to Taxpayers? End the Wasteful and Costly Overlap

President Trump has tapped America’s modern-age renaissance man, Elon Musk, to weed out waste, fraud, and abuse within the federal government. Thus far, USAID, the Department of Education, and the Pentagon are primary targets for these cost-saving measures. Mr. Musk is no dummy. He likely has already done an analysis of which departments have the most likely sources of waste, fraud, and abuse and also which are the most likely to be resolvable using practical efforts. My intent here is not to criticize or applaud the DOGE team in any manner. Rather, my goal is to point out that one government agency is duplicating an expensive endeavor being handled with no cost to the taxpayer. That’s downright wasteful. 

NHTSA Crash Testing
NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration), a part of the Department of Transportation, is a government agency that has been tasked with ensuring that America’s highways and byways are as safe as they can be. This is a wide-ranging goal that I support 110%. I’ve lost friends and family members in vehicle crashes, mostly caused by drunk drivers. NHTSA battles hard to make our roads, drivers, and vehicles safer, something I think every American can understand and most would wholeheartedly support. 

However, one thing that NHTSA does is crash-test vehicles. They do a pretty good job with the crash tests. The results are oversimplified for consumers using a “Five-Star” safety ratings system. The idea is that shoppers can use this rating system to learn about the safety of the vehicles they are considering owning, be they new or used. It makes perfect sense. If you are considering two vehicles and one has a 2-star rating and another a 5-star rating, you may wish to investigate how one could be so terrible and possibly remove it from consideration. The problem is nearly every vehicle tested earns a 4-star or 5-star rating. Making the differences less than obvious. 

NHTSA Does What IIHS Does, But Not As Well
If NHTSA were the only entity in America crash-testing vehicles, I would suggest DOGE skip it and move on to another possible source of wasteful spending. The thing is, there is an independent, not-for-profit group that is also doing vehicle crash testing. It’s called the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, IIHS. This group has been around since the 1960s, and today does more crash tests than NHTSA. IIHS also does a much better job with the tests, in my expert opinion. 

Why Vehicle Safety Experts and Testers Turn to IIHS and Not NHTSA
I have been reporting on vehicle safety for two decades. I routinely use both NHTSA and IIHS safety ratings to complete long-format vehicle reviews at Car Talk, where I have worked for about nine years. I have tested and reviewed a vehicle a week for a decade, and I also conduct shorter tests of vehicles back-to-back at special media-only events conducted on racetracks and closed courses for safety. Of course, we don’t crash the cars. Rather, we leave that to IIHS and NHTSA. They conduct testing, and we, who review the vehicles to assist shoppers when they are buying, pull in the results so that our reviews offer crash safety scores. The thing is, I find that IIHS has a broader selection of crash-test results, more timely crash-test results, and far greater detail for those who wish to look deeply into the results. To say it simply, IIHS is a better crash-testing organization than NHTSA. So why do we need both if IIHS is testing all the cars that NHTSA is, plus many more?

Technical Details and Evolving Difficulty
Both NHTSA and IIHS conduct all the tests you would expect, such as a frontal collision and side collision. However, IIHS added many more tests. IIHS also tests roof strength and conducts active safety system testing that goes beyond what NHTSA does. In fact, IIHS does headlight testing that is real-world useful to shoppers and by far the best such testing done by any agency in the world. IIHS also makes their tests harder and harder to earn top scores on as time passes. It makes the speeds higher, and the side impact test sled gets bigger and heavier. It is no exaggeration to say that IIHS is pushing automakers to constantly make vehicles safer. My personal opinion is that the “Top Safety Pick” designation packs a lot more punch to a consumer than a 5-star rated vehicle designation. 

Funding Sources
NHTSA has a budget of just under one billion dollars in 2020. It’s risen to over $1.6 billion in 2025. Yet, article after article reports that our roads are not safer. More deaths are occurring. Not less. We are orders of magnitude safer today on our roads than we were in the bad old days of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, but the safety curve flattened dramatically and has not improved much over the past couple of decades. Eliminating drunk drivers would take roughly a third of the death off the table immediately, but America loves its most popular poison and has opted not to make drunk driving a crime that drivers fear committing. 

By contrast to NHTSA, IIHS is funded entirely by America’s top insurance companies. IIHS and the insurance industry both want the same things:

• Reduced deaths
• Reduced injuries
• Lower costs due to death and injury
• Lower costs for repairs 

IIHS - Responsiveness
Insurers figured out long ago that they make more money when they pay fewer claims. That’s how IIHS began, and why it is so successful today. As a safety reporter at two publications, I frequently receive press releases from IIHS. They exemplify professionalism. Many of the press releases include images and videos free to use by the media. If I want more details or if I want a quote to place in a story, IIHS offers instant help. Here’s an example of just how helpful IIHS is. I wanted some background today for a story I am doing related to seat belts and the audible and visual alerts that we all know and don’t love. I phoned IIHS, and Joe Young, my contact at the organization, picked up the phone on the third ring. He gave me about 15 minutes of his time, answered all my questions, and when I asked him to e-mail me a link to a law related to the subject, he did so -  in three minutes. IIHS is hyper-helpful to the media who report on vehicle safety, almost like a partner. I have never been emailed a NHTSA press release. 

Don’t Throw the Baby Out With the Bathwater
As an expert in vehicle safety who has reported on the subject in two decades, I am not suggesting that DOGE close NHTSA. My suggestion would be simply to stop the ridiculous overlap of crash testing that IIHS does better. Shift the savings to the other aspects of NHTSA’s work, or simply return the savings back to the taxpayers by reducing the budget back to the 2020 budget. Having two agencies in America crashing the same cars, and reporting the same results is simply silly and the very definition of government waste.

Do you think we need two agencies doing the same work?

If IIHS is doing more and better crash testing, why are we spending tax dollars to do it worse and less?
 

John Goreham is a credentialed New England Motor Press Association member and expert vehicle tester. John completed an engineering program with a focus on electric vehicles, followed by two decades of work in high-tech, biopharma, and the automotive supply chain before becoming a news contributor. He is a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE int). In addition to his eleven years of work at Torque News, John has published thousands of articles and reviews at American news outlets. He is known for offering unfiltered opinions on vehicle topics. You can connect with John on Linkedin and follow his work on his personal X channel or on our X channel. Please note that stories carrying John's by-line are never AI-generated, but he does employ grammar and punctuation software when proofreading and he also uses image generation tools. 

Image of dollars flying out of a crash test vehicle created by John Goreham using Grok.