Sean Duffy’s War on Transportation Safety
Relatedly, the department’s first press release after Duffy’s confirmation, issued on January 28, announced his first action on the job: “signing a memorandum directing staff to start the process of resetting Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which will ultimately lower the price of a car for American consumers and eliminate the electric vehicle mandate.” It’s an odd claim. Fuel economy standards require that the vehicles carmakers sell use fuel more efficiently, i.e., that they get more mileage per gallon of gas. The so-called “electric vehicle mandate” put in place by the Biden administration doesn’t mandate that automakers sell a certain number or percentage of electric vehicles, or prevent consumers from buying gas-powered ones. DOT estimated that the incremental improvements in fleet-wide fuel economy that those rules require will save passenger car and light truck drivers more than $600 over the lifetime of their vehicles. Heavy-duty pickup and van owners are estimated to save more than $700.
Duffy, by contrast, calls the rules “burdensome and overly restrictive,” arguing they’ve “needlessly driven up the cost of a car in order to push a radical Green New Deal agenda.” Car prices have indeed risen over the last several years, but the Biden administration’s new CAFE standards—finalized last June—don’t seem to have much to do with it. Aside from the price pressures of supply chain constraints and rising interest rates, U.S. automakers have spent decades specializing in making bigger and more expensive cars—in part to skirt fuel economy regulations and boost profit margins. White House policy may well send the price of cars soaring even further. While on hold for now, Trump’s proposed 25 percent tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada threaten to raise the cost of new cars by anywhere from $1,000 to $9,000. While in Congress, Duffy led an effort to strengthen Trump’s tariff powers.
Part of the exorbitant cost of car ownership, moreover, is the skyrocketing price of car insurance. The cost of full-coverage car insurance rose by more than 25 percent nationwide in 2024 and by more than 40 percent in some states. Drivers in Nevada, Michigan, Florida, and Louisiana now spend more than 5 percent of their income on car insurance premiums, on average.
