A Voluntary Program That Nobody Would Join
On June 26, 2026, NHTSA formally withdrew the Automated Driving System-Equipped Vehicle Safety, Transparency, and Evaluation Program — AV STEP — from the Federal Register (docket 2026-12980). The decision is the first major deregulatory move under the Trump administration's AV Framework, announced by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy in April 2025. And taken on its own terms, it is defensible.
AV STEP was proposed in January 2025 as a voluntary framework: AV manufacturers who enrolled would agree to structured data reporting and public disclosure of their safety operations in exchange for streamlined regulatory treatment. Thirty-seven public comments arrived by the March 17, 2025 deadline. The reaction was not encouraging.
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation warned that "the burdens of the current reporting requirements would outweigh the benefit of program participation." The ACES Mobility Coalition called it a program that "introduces unnecessary reporting burdens and new operational restrictions, without providing any meaningful regulatory or safety benefits." Stakeholders also disagreed sharply on how the program balanced federal versus state oversight authority, and whether an independent assessor should evaluate AV safety performance.
NHTSA drew the obvious conclusion: a voluntary regime that the industry refuses to join cannot produce the "substantial volume of ADS operations oversight" the agency intended. Maintaining a proposed rule that would yield a small, self-selected cohort — while leaving the rest of the industry untouched — was not a serious oversight program.
The Administration's Logic Holds — To a Point
The Trump AV Framework rests on a defensible premise: the patchwork of guidance documents and exemption pipelines built for a nascent AV industry needs to be replaced by something that can scale with a maturing one. The April 2025 expansion of the Automated Vehicle Exemption Program (AVEP), which for the first time extended federal motor vehicle safety standards exemptions to domestically produced vehicles, is a genuine structural improvement. The revised Standing General Order on Crash Reporting — effective June 16, 2025 — consolidates duplicative reporting into a cleaner, faster data pipeline and eliminates zero-incident monthly filings.
The strongest version of this deregulatory argument is practical: AV companies now operating across 11 US metropolitan areas generate far more internal safety data than any lightly subscribed voluntary programme could mandate. Market incentives, liability exposure, and adverse press from high-profile incidents all create accountability mechanisms that a voluntary club-membership regime cannot match.
But the structural concern does not disappear because the framing shifts. The crash reporting order was specifically redesigned to narrow its scope — removing what NHTSA called "unnecessary and duplicative requirements." That may be efficient regulation. It is not the same thing as a transparency programme. The agency's argument that AVEP and revised crash reporting "serve the same goals" as AV STEP assumes those mechanisms are resourced, public-facing, and capable of surfacing systemic patterns. Currently, they are not.
The Transparency Gap Is Real
NHTSA's oversight capacity has been hollowed out at precisely the moment it is being asked to do less. DOGE-driven cuts eliminated approximately three of the roughly seven specialists in NHTSA's autonomous vehicle oversight unit — a reduction of roughly 43 percent in the team responsible for monitoring an industry deploying at scale for the first time. Recall investigations agency-wide fell sharply in 2025.
That matters because safety data is not self-organizing. When Cruise's 2023 pedestrian fatality triggered its San Francisco operating suspension, it surfaced through journalism and legal proceedings — not through a federal programme that monitored aggregate incident patterns. A well-designed data repository catches clusters of minor incidents in particular environments, edge-case failures that no single operator has incentive to publicize, and cross-fleet anomalies that only become visible when data is standardized and centralized. Market forces and crash reporting catch headline events. They are structurally poor at surfacing sub-threshold patterns.
NHTSA's bet is that the existing mechanisms are sufficient. That bet is being placed while the agency's capacity to verify its own assumptions has been cut to the bone.
Congress Steps In
The legislative branch has not waited. H.R. 7390, the SELF DRIVE Act of 2026, introduced in February 2026 and referred to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, would mandate that NHTSA establish a National Automated Vehicle Safety Data Repository by September 30, 2026. Manufacturers of ADS-equipped vehicles would be required to report covered crashes within 30 days of occurrence or 10 days of receiving notice, whichever comes later.
If enacted, H.R. 7390 accomplishes through statute what AV STEP attempted through incentive design — and sidesteps the entire industry-opt-in problem that doomed the voluntary programme. The September 2026 deadline is aggressive; whether a resource-constrained NHTSA could actually build and operate such a repository on that timeline is a real implementation question. But the legislative direction is correct.
What Proportionate Oversight Looks Like
The right framework here is neither AV STEP's voluntary club — which operators could join or ignore — nor the opposite extreme of prescriptive deployment approvals that treat every autonomous mile as a controlled experiment requiring federal sign-off. The productive middle ground is mandatory incident disclosure with standardized, machine-readable output: crash and near-miss data that researchers, insurers, state regulators, and the public can actually analyze.
Withdrawing a voluntary programme that industry refused to join was the right call. Treating that withdrawal as the completion of federal AV oversight obligations, rather than the beginning of a harder statutory conversation, would be a serious mistake. NHTSA's leverage over the AV industry is not primarily about blocking deployments — it is about setting the data floor below which no operator should be permitted to operate without public accountability. H.R. 7390 is the clearest current vehicle for rebuilding that floor. The administration's deregulatory logic works only if the mandatory baseline it is dismantling gets rebuilt through legislation before the gap becomes structural.