A QUESTION OF ETHICS: Rulemaking. To ensure highway safety and protect driver health, Congress…

A QUESTION OF ETHICS: Rulemaking. To ensure highway safety
and protect driver health, Congress charged federal agencies with regulating
the hours of service of commercial motor vehicle operators. Between 1940 and
2003, the regulations that applied to long-haul truck drivers were mostly
unchanged. (Long-haul drivers are those who operate beyond a 150-mile radius of
their base.) In 2003, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMSCA)
revised the regulations signifi cantly, increasing the number of daily and
weekly hours that drivers could work. The agency had not considered the

A QUESTION OF ETHICS: Rulemaking. To ensure highway safety
and protect driver health, Congress charged federal agencies with regulating
the hours of service of commercial motor vehicle operators. Between 1940 and
2003, the regulations that applied to long-haul truck drivers were mostly
unchanged. (Long-haul drivers are those who operate beyond a 150-mile radius of
their base.) In 2003, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMSCA)
revised the regulations signifi cantly, increasing the number of daily and
weekly hours that drivers could work. The agency had not considered the impact
of the changes on the health of the drivers, however, and the revisions were
overturned. The FMSCA then issued a notice that it would reconsider the revisions
and opened them up for public comment. The agency analyzed the costs to the
industry and the crash risks due to driver fatigue under different options and
concluded that the safety benefi ts of not increasing the hours were less than
the economic costs. In 2005, the agency issued a rule that was nearly identical
to the 2003 version. Public Citizen, Inc., and others, including the
Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, asked the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the District of Columbia Circuit to review the 2005 rule as it applied to
long-haul drivers. [Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, Inc. v.
Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, 494 F.3d 188 (D.C.Cir. 2007)]

(a) The agencys cost-benefi t analysis included new
methods that were not disclosed to the public in time for comments. Was this
unethical? Should the agency have disclosed the new methodology sooner? Why or
why not? (b) The agency created a graph to show the risk of a crash as a
function of the time a driver spent on the job. The graph plotted the fi rst
twelve hours of a day individually, but the rest of the time was depicted with
an aggregate fi gure at the seventeenth hour. This made the risk at those hours
appear to be lower. Is it unethical for an agency to manipulate data? Explain.