WASHINGTON — Elon Musk has long railed against the U.S. government, saying a crushing number of federal investigations and safety programs have stymied Tesla, the publicly traded electric car company he leads, and its efforts to create self-driving automobiles.
Now, Musk’s close relationship with President Donald J. Trump means many of those federal headaches could vanish.
The Trump administration could quickly nix a host of federal probes and safety programs: crash investigations into Tesla’s partially automated vehicles; a U.S. Department of Justice criminal investigation examining whether Musk and Tesla have overstated their cars' self-driving capabilities; and a government mandate to report crash data on vehicles using technology like Tesla’s Autopilot.
Safety advocates, who credit such federal investigations and recalls with saving lives, say the consequences of such actions could prove dire.
“Musk wants to run the Department of Transportation,” said Missy Cummings, a former senior safety adviser at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “I’ve lost count of the number of investigations that are underway with Tesla. They will all be gone.”
Here are some key things to know about what what experts think might happen:
Musk and Trump are aggressively seeking to revamp government
The White House and Musk is waging an unbridled war against the federal government — freezing spending and programs while sacking a host of career employees, including prosecutors and government watchdogs typically shielded from such brazen dismissals without cause.
The actions have sparked outcries from legal scholars who say the Trump administration’s actions are without modern-day precedent and are already upending the balance of power in Washington.
The Trump administration has not yet declared any actions that could benefit Tesla or Musk’s other companies. However, snuffing out federal investigations or jettisoning safety initiatives would be a much easier task than their audacious assault on regulators and the bureaucracy.
“Trump’s election, and the bromance between Trump and Musk, will essentially lead to the defanging of a regulatory environment that’s been stifling Tesla,” said Daniel Ives, a veteran Wall Street technology and automobile industry analyst.
Federal government has a lot of power over Tesla
The federal government’s power over Tesla is wide-ranging. It can investigate, order recalls and mandate crash data reporting. However, the Trump administration could quickly ease up on Tesla and on the other companies in Musk’s sprawling business empire.
A host of Musk’s other businesses — such as his aerospace company SpaceX and his social media company X — are subjects of federal investigations.
Tesla alone is facing federal probes from a litany of agencies, including the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Labor Relations Board.
The federal agency that has the most power over Tesla — and the entire automobile industry — is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is part of the Department of Transportation.
NHTSA sets automobile safety standards that must be met before vehicles can enter the marketplace. It also has a quasi-law enforcement arm, the Office of Defects Investigation, that has the power to launch probes into crashes and seek recalls for safety defects.
The agency has six pending investigations into Tesla’s self-driving technology, prompted by dozens of crashes that took place when the computerized systems were in use.
“NHTSA has been a thorn in Musk’s side for over the last decade and he’s grappled with almost every three-letter agency in the Beltway,” said Ives, the Wall Street analyst who covers the technology sector and automobile industry. “That’s all created what looks to be a really big soap opera in 2025.”
Victims and attorneys worry about a lack of oversight
People whose lives have been forever changed by Tesla crashes fear that dangerous and fatal accidents may increase if the federal government’s investigative and recall powers are restricted.
They say they worry that the company may otherwise never be held accountable for its failures, like the one that took the life of 22-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon, who was killed when a Tesla blew through a three-way intersection in rural Florida.
Benavides Leon died at the scene; her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, suffered injuries but survived. A federal investigation determined that Autopilot in Tesla’s vehicles at this time was faulty and needed repairs.
“We, as a family, have never been the same,” said Benavides' sister, Neima. “I’m an engineer and everything that we design and we build has to be by important codes and regulations. This technology cannot be an exception.”
“It has to be investigated when it fails,” she added. “Because it does fail.”
Tesla’s lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement on X in December 2023, Tesla pointed to an earlier lawsuit the Benavides family had brought against the driver who struck the college student. He testified that despite using Autopilot, “I was highly aware that it was still my responsibility to operate the vehicle safely.”
Tesla also said that because the driver “was pressing the accelerator to maintain 60 mph” his actions effectively overrode Autopilot, which would have otherwise restricted the speed to 45 mph on the rural road, something Benavides' attorney disputes.
In the pending wrongful death lawsuit that Neima Benavides filed against Tesla after her sister’s death, her attorney told a Miami district judge the lawsuit would have likely been dropped if NHTSA hadn’t investigated and found defects with the Autopilot system.
“All along we were hoping that the NHTSA investigation would produce what it did, in fact, end up producing, which is a finding of product defect and a recall,” attorney Doug Eaton said during a March court hearing. “And we had told you very early on in the case if NHTSA had not found that, we may very well drop the case. But they did, in fact, find this.”