You can’t own the libs by supporting a bill that they want passed.
You can’t own the libs by supporting a bill that they want passed.
O n Truth Social yesterday, Donald Trump announced his support for the Railway Safety Act, a bill introduced in Congress after the Norfolk Southern freight-train derailment that occurred in East Palestine, Ohio, in early February:
Crooked Joe Biden has still not visited the incredible Patriots of East Palestine, and Mayor Pete couldn’t get out of there fast enough. But that’s ok — our movement will be their voice, and we will NEVER forget them. JD Vance has been working hard in the Senate to make sure nothing like this EVER happens again, and that’s why it’s so important for Congress to pass his Railway Safety Act. JD’s terrific bill has my Complete and Total Endorsement!!!
Trump tries to paint himself as being in opposition to Democrats, but Democrats support this bill. Senators Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio), Bob Casey (D., Pa.), and John Fetterman (D., Pa.) cosponsored it when it was first introduced on March 1. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also supports it, after falsely blaming the Trump administration for causing the accident. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg supports it. And on March 2, President Biden announced his support, saying, “I applaud the bipartisan group of senators for proposing rail safety legislation that provides many of the solutions that my administration has been calling for.”
The bill does include many provisions the Biden administration has been calling for. After stridently calling out Buttigieg’s incompetence, some Republican senators, and now the last Republican president, are proposing to give Buttigieg more regulatory authority.
The Railway Safety Act was initially 18 pages long. Now, after bouncing around the Senate for two months, the bill is 76 pages. Senate Commerce Committee chairwoman Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.) said Monday that the 76-page version will be up for a vote to advance out of committee on Wednesday.
The original version had nine “Secretary shall” phrases; the current version has 35. Counting the number of times a piece of legislation says the “Secretary shall” gives you a good idea of the number of times Congress is delegating authority to the bureaucracy.
The bill keeps the crew-size mandate from the original bill, saying that two crewmen are required to be in the cab for a freight train to operate. Never mind that the East Palestine train had three crewmen, or that research has not found any connection between crew size and safety. Two-man crews are the industry standard right now, and this rule would have little to no effect on current operations, but it could inhibit technological improvements tied to automation in the future.
Mandating two-man crews has long been a demand of railroad unions and has long been recognized by conservatives as such. The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) tried to impose it during the Obama administration, but the Trump administration withdrew the proposal because it was not supported by safety evidence. Trump’s FRA administrator, Ronald Batory, went through the evidence gathered from numerous stakeholders over the yearslong rulemaking process to conclude that it wasn’t necessary to increase safety in his decision to withdraw the rule in 2019. The Biden administration has since revived it.
The Heritage Foundation’s recently released “2025 Mandate for Leadership,” which is intended as guidance to the next Republican president, says that the FRA’s crew-size rulemaking “is not based on safety considerations.” It says that “FRA’s singular focus on job preservation is contrary to FRA’s mission” and that the agency is “promoting actions that favor the status quo and inhibit the use of technology to improve railroad safety.” Enacting the crew-size rule by legislation rather than through administrative action doesn’t change its lack of relevance to safety or its inhibition of technological development.
The current version of the bill scraps the original version’s requirement for one hotbox detector for every ten miles of track. Hotbox detectors are trackside devices that use infrared sensors to assess whether wheelsets are overheating. An overheated wheelset was the cause of the East Palestine derailment, according to the National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report.
Instead of the ten-mile requirement, the bill authorizes the creation of a “rail defect detector analysis program,” which gives the DOT new broad powers to regulate the maintenance, testing, inspection, and installation of detectors. The new standards are to be “risk-based,” with different spacing of detectors based on safety factors such as population and existing infrastructure.
Yet railroads already analyze risks when deciding where to place hotbox detectors, and they have been very successful in preventing accidents. In 2019, an FRA report said, “Train accident rates caused by axle and bearing-related factors have dropped 81 percent since 1980 and 59 percent since 1990 due to the use of [hotbox] detectors.” A February safety advisory from the FRA found only five accidents caused by overheating wheelsets since 2021, with a total of zero deaths or injuries.
Constantine Tarawneh, a mechanical-engineering professor with published research on wheel bearings, told Trains in March that adding more hotbox detectors still wouldn’t prevent some accidents, because it’s possible for a wheelset to overheat in under a mile. As a better alternative, Tarawneh pointed to new devices currently in development that would be affixed to railcars and detect potential bearing problems before overheating begins. Different versions of those devices are being developed by the University Transportation Center for Railway Safety, with which Tarawneh works, and RailPulse, a technology coalition that includes Norfolk Southern.
Those devices are likely to become cheaper as they develop, and railroads are already interested in them. The money spent on hotbox detectors, which Trains estimated could be between $1.2 billion and $2.1 billion, will not be able to be spent on this promising new technology that would do the job better.
The bill also gives Buttigieg power to create a new regulatory regime for railcar inspections. There is no evidence that insufficient railcar inspection contributed to the East Palestine crash. Most railcars in the U.S., including the one that caused the East Palestine derailment and 99.9 percent of all tank cars, are not owned by the railroads, but rather by the shippers whose freight they carry or third-party companies that lease them. Railroads still inspect cars they don’t own, to make sure they are functioning properly before they are included on a train, but maintenance responsibilities ultimately reside with the cars’ owners.
To the extent that this new raft of regulations makes shipping by rail more expensive and less flexible, it will encourage shippers to use other modes of transportation that are more dangerous. As Philip Rossetti wrote for the R Street Institute, shipping by rail is both safer and better for the environment than shipping by truck, the most common alternative. Rather than regulating specific modes of transportation, he wrote, if Congress wants to actually increase safety, it should look at the rules surrounding hazardous materials in general. Regulating hazardous-materials transportation properly requires doing so across all modes; targeting only one will just push marginal traffic to others. But that’s not what this bill is about.
Instead, Democrats in Congress are bringing along Republicans in support of a bill that has quadrupled in length to expand Pete Buttigieg’s authority to regulate things that bore little or no blame for the East Palestine accident that spawned it. Soon after Trump’s endorsement, Senators Mike Braun (R., Ind.) and Roger Marshall (R., Kan.) announced their support. Mitt Romney (R., Utah) has also announced his support.
Trump is endorsing a Biden-backed bill that includes policies that his own administration rightly rejected while claiming he’s sticking it to Democrats. Democrats want this bill. Republicans, who claim to care about reducing the power of the administrative state, should oppose it.
Editor’s note: This article has been edited since its original publication.