The first Trump administration scrapped a union-supported Obama regulation mandating two-man freight train crews. The second Trump administration won’t take its own side of the argument.
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced a slate of deregulatory actions late last week as part of the Trump administration’s broad effort to cut the federal government’s burden on the economy. “The deregulatory package will rescind, withdraw, or amend burdensome regulations that do not enhance safety,” the press release said. “Under President Trump’s leadership, my department is slashing duplicative and outdated regulations that are unnecessarily burdensome, waste taxpayer dollars, and fail to ensure safety,” Duffy said.
One necessary deregulatory action was conspicuously absent, however: the withdrawal of the Biden administration’s 2024 rule mandating two-man crews for freight trains. The rule has nothing to do with safety, and reversing it should be easy to do. Trump has already done it once.
The Obama administration initiated the rulemaking process in 2016 for the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) to mandate two-man crews. That process was not complete by the time Trump took office in 2017, and the FRA under Trump terminated the rulemaking in 2019.
The FRA’s reason for doing so was straightforward. “Despite studying this issue in-depth and performing extensive outreach to industry stakeholders and the general public, FRA’s statement . . . that it ‘cannot provide reliable or conclusive statistical data to suggest whether one-person crew operations are generally safer or less safe than multiple-person crew operations’ still holds true today,” the agency said in its decision to withdraw the rule in 2019.
The decision described how two train accidents in 2013, one in Canada and one in the United States, led regulators to investigate whether mandating staff levels would be a viable way to improve safety. Subsequent research, including the accident reports from those incidents and the FRA’s own data, showed that mandating two-man crews would have no effect on safety.
This wasn’t merely a case of not being worthwhile on average. “FRA reviewed accident/incident data over a seventeen-year period ending in 2018 and could not determine that any of the accidents/incidents involving a one-person crew would have been prevented by having multiple crewmembers,” the 2019 FRA decision said (emphasis added).
The FRA went on to say that mandating the current industry standard of two-man crews would “unnecessarily impede the future of rail innovation and automation.” The most common cause of train accidents is human error, and automated trains have the potential to improve safety while also being more efficient to operate.
These findings were made during Trump’s presidency and under the Trump-appointed FRA administrator, Ronald Batory. When Biden assumed office, his administrator, Amit Bose, sought to undo Trump’s actions and return to the Obama-era rule mandating crew size.
Biden promised to bring back the rule on the campaign trail, as part of his self-described effort to be the most pro-union president in history. Unions, of course, support mandating crew size to protect unionized jobs through government regulation, even though technological advances have made the second crewman largely superfluous.
Most trains in other developed countries, and most passenger trains in the U.S., operate with one crew member in the cab. Modern technology, such as positive train control, which is in place on every major freight rail line in the U.S. as of 2020, does much of the work that the second crewman used to do. Unions also oppose automated track inspection, even though pilot programs have shown that it is superior to human track inspection for detecting faults quickly and accurately.
In 2022, when freight rail unions were engaged in a prolonged contract dispute with railroads, the Biden administration imposed itself on the unions’ side of the debate by having the FRA again restart the rulemaking process to mandate two-man crews. It finalized that regulation in April 2024. Despite the window dressing about safety, the Associated Press straightforwardly described it as “a milestone in organized labor’s long fight to preserve the practice.”
Now, Trump’s nominee for FRA administrator, David Fink, has promised to keep the crew-size mandate from Biden’s presidency. Secretary Duffy also promised to do so during his confirmation hearing.
It’s not as though Trump is indebted to the freight rail unions politically. The International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers (SMART), whose Transportation Division is the largest freight rail union, spent about $80 million on politically tinged advocacy and consulting between 2019 and 2022, nearly all of it aligned with Democrats and progressivism. SMART-TD endorsed Kamala Harris for president in 2024. Despite the Teamsters national union not making an endorsement, the Teamsters Rail Conference, which includes the second-largest freight rail union, endorsed Harris as well.
It seems that the motivating event in making crew size an issue again for Republicans was the freight train accident in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023. Never mind that the train in that accident had three men in the cab (a trainee was present in addition to the normal two crew members). The Railway Safety Act, introduced by then-Senator JD Vance in response to the accident — a bill supported by all Senate Democrats, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and the unions — included a mandate for two-man crews.
Trump said he supported Vance’s bill, which made no sense, as I pointed out at the time, because it included policies that his own administration had rightly rejected. The bill didn’t go anywhere in the Senate because of Republican opposition, but it was part of the development of Trump and Vance’s political relationship that culminated in Vance’s becoming vice president.
The rule’s unfitness has not changed since Trump terminated Obama’s proposed rule in 2019, or since the Ohio accident in 2023. When the Heritage Foundation published its gargantuan “Project 2025” report advising a potential Trump administration in April 2023, two months after the East Palestine accident, it included criticism of Biden’s crew-size rule in its recommendations for the Department of Transportation.
“Instead of basing regulatory decisions on the costs and benefits of the available alternatives, FRA is promoting actions that favor the status quo and inhibit the use of technology to improve railroad safety,” the Project 2025 report said of the Biden administration’s approach to railroad regulation. It said that the crew-size rule is “not based on safety considerations” and would “reduce flexibility” when there is “no operational need for a second crew member.”
The Trump administration should include freight rail in its deregulatory agenda, starting by pulling the plug on Joe Biden’s resuscitation of Obama’s crew-size mandate. All the administration has to do is listen to itself from six years ago.