WASHINGTON (AP) - The agency responsible for safety on the nation's roads was years late in detecting a deadly problem with General Motors cars and lacks the expertise to oversee increasingly complex vehicles, congressional Republicans charged in a report Tuesday.
The report by a House committee's GOP majority raised serious questions about the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's ability to keep the public safe, and came as the Senate convened a hearing on the safety agency's shortcomings.
Safety regulators should have discovered GM's faulty ignition switches seven years before the company recalled 2.6 million cars to fix the deadly problem, the report concluded.
It also said the agency didn't understand how air bags worked, lacked accountability and failed to share information internally.
"As vehicle functions and safety systems become increasingly complex and interconnected, NHTSA needs to keep pace with these rapid advancements in technology," the report said. "As evidenced by the GM recall, this may be a greater challenge than even NHTSA understands."
At least 19 people died in crashes caused by the faulty switches in GM small cars like the Chevrolet Cobalt. The company acknowledged knowing about the problem for at least a decade, but it didn't recall the cars until February. The delays left the problem on the roads, causing numerous crashes that resulted in deaths and injuries. Lawmakers have said they expect the death toll to rise to near 100.
NHTSA already has fined GM the maximum $35 million for failing to report information on the switches, but the committee found that many of the bureaucratic snafus that plagued GM also are present at NHTSA.
"While NHTSA now complains about GM's switch, it seems NHTSA was asleep at the switch too," Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., said in a statement.
NHTSA blamed GM for the delays and said many problems cited by the committee were fixed in a 2011 review. GM, the agency said, hid information by fixing switches without changing the part numbers, causing the number of complaints about the switches to decline and skewing data.
The agency said it has a strong record of pursuing defects, influencing almost 1,300 recalls covering 95 million vehicles and parts in the last decade. NHTSA also said it's using sophisticated tools to search for defects and it has an improved complaint-tracking process. It's also discussing with Congress the need for more investigators.
At the Senate hearing Tuesday, David Friedman, acting administrator of the NHTSA, took exception to an assertion by Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., that GM's failure to share key information with NHTSA was due to incompetence rather than intent. "It wasn't simply incompetence on their part," Friedman said. "They were actively trying to hide the ball. NHTSA was working to find the ball."
Heller and Senate Democrat Claire McCaskill of Missouri called on the White House to name a permanent chief of NHTSA, saying it will be hard for an interim chief to lead reforms.