Self-Driving Cars Will Be Regulated by an Industry Insider
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is the US agency charged with overseeing automobile safety, including rapidly proliferating self-driving cars. The agency’s new head reportedly worked on Apple’s self-driving car project until recently.
Jonathan Morrison is another example of the revolving door in the Trump administration, which is already rife with appointees plucked from the industries they are now charged with overseeing. (Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images)
As tech companies roll out self-driving cars in ever more locales, the federal agency deciding on the future of autonomous vehicles on the nation’s highways has a new top cop: a Silicon Valley attorney who reportedly worked on Apple’s top-secret self-driving car project, but who refuses to confirm or deny the allegations to the public.
President Donald Trump’s choice for the country’s highway czar has been allowed to keep his stock in Apple, according to federal ethics disclosures reviewed by the Lever. He’s also been tied to allegations of corporate meddling in road safety issues during the first Trump administration.
Last month, lawmakers confirmed Trump appointee Jonathan Morrison to helm the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Department of Transportation arm charged with overseeing automobile safety. Up until his nomination, Morrison was a lawyer at Apple, where he reportedly worked on so-called Project Titan, the tech giant’s secretive, and ultimately failed, self-driving car experiment.
When confronted by lawmakers at his nomination hearing, he declined to discuss the work he did for Apple, refusing questions about whether he was involved in Project Titan.
Morrison is another example of the revolving door in the Trump administration, which is already rife with appointees plucked from the industries they are now charged with overseeing.
And he takes office at a moment when a new self-driving car project seemingly hits the streets every day, from Amazon’s Zoox robotaxis, which are launching around the country, to Lyft’s autonomous ride-hailing rollout, to Waymo’s expansions into new cities. Even Tesla, which has faced a series of investigations into its self-driving software, has revived a feature for its self-driving cars that ignores the speed limit to drive at high speeds.
The technology behemoths experimenting with autonomous vehicles, from Alphabet to Amazon, are now eager to influence the NHTSA and have celebrated Morrison’s new leadership in the weeks since his confirmation. The Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, the primary lobbying arm for self-driving vehicles, released a statement last month that “applauds” Morrison’s confirmation and called it a “pivotal moment” for the industry.
Road safety advocates, however, are more concerned.
Self-driving vehicles, from Waymo’s white Jaguars to fully autonomous tractor-trailers, can already be found on roads across the country, subject to a patchwork of local and state regulations. But the NHTSA has the authority to oversee self-driving cars on the federal level, giving the agency an important role in what safety standards will govern self-driving cars on highways across the United States.
It falls on the agency to investigate autonomous vehicle manufacturers when safety concerns arise and consider exemption requests from companies, like Amazon’s Zoox, that require carveouts from federal safety standards in order to operate commercially. The agency has also proposed a national framework for self-driving cars, giving it more power and oversight over the industry.
Though it’s still too early to say what approach highway regulators will now take under Morrison, the Trump administration has indicated it wants to hasten the rollout of autonomous vehicles as part of the president’s artificial intelligence deregulation mandate. The development has stoked concerns among road safety advocates, who have long advocated for a cautious approach to the technology.
Critics have already been sounding the alarm on some of the first moves that Trump’s transportation officials made on autonomous vehicles, including policy revisions effective in June that relaxed some crash data reporting requirements for self-driving cars.
Morrison, for his part, has promised to slash “restrictions that hamper innovation” on the nation’s highways, though he has at the same time emphasized the importance of safety.
Such promises of “innovation” and streamlining progress, which transportation officials frequently parrot under the Trump administration, are “buzzwords” for favorable policy to the autonomous vehicle industry, Catherine Chase, the president of the nonprofit Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, told the Lever.
“Our organization is not for or against autonomous vehicles, but we want to make sure that they’re done deliberately,” she said. These safety standards are at stake in the coming months, she said, as the new administration charts out how to proceed with the technology.
Proponents of autonomous vehicles tend to highlight the alleged safety benefits of the technology, promising fewer car crashes and safer roads. But, as federal traffic regulators admitted in policy documents as recently as January, such claims remain “largely unproven.” Self-driving cars “struggle with driving tasks that humans consider relatively simple,” regulators wrote, and even those that are operating commercially, like Waymo, for instance, typically “operate in limited environments.”
Regardless, there are powerful private interests behind the self-driving car rollout. The Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association reported spending more than $400,000 on federal lobbying last year and is on track to exceed that amount in 2025, all backed by the ever more powerful Big Tech lobby.
The Secrets of Project Titan
Morrison spent most of his career working for car dealership trade associations before joining the NHTSA, for the first time, as chief counsel in 2017 under the first Trump administration. In 2021, he departed his post for an industry job — working as an attorney for Apple’s “special projects group,” a position he held for over four years.
During this time, Apple was working on an initiative dubbed internally as Project Titan, its effort to develop a self-driving electric vehicle. The multibillion-dollar project spanned a decade, intended to compete with other tech companies like Alphabet, Google’s parent company, but ended in failure. Apple ended the project in early 2024, laying off hundreds of employees. Morrison left the company a year later, in April 2025, after his nomination to the second Trump administration.
In 2022, the Information reported that Apple hired Morrison in 2021 in order to help the company gain exemptions from regulators for its self-driving cars in Project Titan, citing a source with direct knowledge. Industry sources told the Lever that Morrison’s position on Project Titan is common knowledge among insiders. The division in which he worked, the special projects group, is known to have housed Apple’s autonomous vehicle work.
But Morrison has declined to confirm whether or not he worked on the project, citing nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) he signed with Apple.
“I am subject to nondisclosure requirements that do not allow me to discuss nonpublic work I performed at Apple,” Morrison said when asked by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) about Project Titan at his June confirmation hearing.
“Have you asked Apple to release you from these NDAs?” Cantwell queried.
Morrison said he had not.
When the Lever reached out to Morrison for comment for this story, a representative of the NHTSA replied that he had no further comment on his work for Apple beyond his confirmation hearing testimony.
In Morrison’s federal ethics agreement, which he signed in May, he volunteered to recuse himself from any agency matters involving Apple, unless he received a waiver from federal officials. But the agreement has allowed him to keep the stock that he owns in the tech company.
Chase, with Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, told the Lever that it remained to be seen whether Morrison’s past work for the industry would influence his tenure as the nation’s top highway administrator.
“We do want an administrator who’s well educated about these systems,” she said. “Hopefully, he will take the stance, as is his charge, to prioritize safety.”
In the Room Where It Happened?
But Morrison does have a stain on his record from his time as chief counsel at the agency that has raised eyebrows among some safety advocates about his leadership now.
In 2023, reporting by ProPublica exposed how officials at the Department of Transportation, including the NHTSA, rewrote a report on recommendations for preventing a deadly class of truck accidents called “underrides,” in which cars or pedestrians become lodged beneath a tractor-trailer, under pressure from the trucking industry.
For years, the trucking industry has pushed back on proposals for federal requirements that safety guards be installed on the sides of trucks to prevent the crashes — a simple and relatively cost-effective solution, advocates say. The report, prepared by a reputable research center, had originally recommended a federal mandate for the safety guards. But after meeting with lobbyists, regulators excised this recommendation from the report, as well as many of its findings.
At the time, Morrison was serving as the NHTSA’s chief counsel. Records that safety advocates obtained via a Freedom of Information Act Request show that he was informed of meetings in 2020 where the revisions to the report were discussed. Because many of the documents released by transportation officials have been heavily redacted, it’s not fully clear what was said at the meeting, or how much Morrison knew.
“I don’t know how much of a part he played,” said Marianne Karth, who has been a fierce advocate for safety reforms since her two daughters were killed in an underride crash in 2013. “But he was chief counsel at [the NHTSA], and he accepted the invitation for that meeting.”
When asked about the report’s conclusions at a Senate committee hearing in July, Morrison said that he was “not familiar with that particular study that was issued.”
In April, Karth filed a formal request with the Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, one of the other agencies involved with the report, asking for regulators to correct the record. The agency denied the request in September, and Karth appealed that decision this month.
The whole series of events, Karth said, showed the “corporate capture” at work at the agency, which has long been deferential to auto manufacturers and other industry interests.
Despite being implicated in the truck underride scandal, Morrison has at other times taken on Big Tech. Back in 2018, as Politico reported this summer, Morrison took Elon Musk’s Tesla to task, authoring a letter that disputed safety claims the electric vehicle company had made about its cars. This month, after demands by federal lawmakers, the NHTSA opened a new investigation into Tesla’s autonomous system.
Rise of the Robo-Lobby
As NHTSA administrator, Morrison will face a powerful autonomous vehicle and tech lobby, which is pushing for exemptions from safety standards and an end to investigations into its technology, like those that Tesla has faced over its self-driving cars.
The power of the self-driving car lobby has so far largely been felt on a local level, since states and cities have largely taken the lead on autonomous vehicle regulation.
Whenever self-driving car operators expand to new localities, their first move is often to hire a cadre of lobbyists. As the Lever has reported, robotaxi companies wined and dined California regulators before gaining access to San Francisco’s streets in 2023. (Within weeks of its launch in San Francisco, one of those companies, Cruise, took its cars off the streets after a crash that seriously injured a pedestrian; the company, which is owned by General Motors, has now shelved its robotaxi efforts entirely.)
Federal regulators, meanwhile, have taken more of a back seat. So far this year — despite bold statements from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy about “slashing red tape” and ushering in a new era of self-driving cars — the agency has yet to take radical action on the issue, experts say.
“What we’ve seen the Department of Transportation put out so far are very general comments without a lot of detail on what changes will actually be made,” Chase said.