Efforts To Understand the Nation’s Drugged Driving Problem Stall Under Trump
GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — Two state transportation workers were replacing a sign on the shoulder of U.S. Highway 6 in western Colorado one morning when a Jeep Grand Cherokee swerved and hit them.
The workers, Nathan Jones and Trent Umberger, died in the September 2024 crash, as did a passenger in the Jeep. Tests revealed that the driver, Patrick Sneddon, then 59, had oxycodone and six times Colorado’s presumptive impairment threshold for THC — the psychoactive compound in cannabis — in his blood. He pleaded guilty and is serving a 30-year prison sentence for three counts of vehicular homicide and other charges.
“Our four children are completely crushed without their father,” Kristine Umberger, Trent’s wife, wrote in a victim impact statement for the local prosecutor. “We have lost our ability to live as before. »
Federal highway safety officials have long tracked the role of alcohol in fatal crashes, but they do not track deaths involving a driver under the influence of drugs or a combination of drugs and alcohol.
This discrepancy is partly due to difficulties in proving impairment, since some drugs remain detectable for weeks after consumption. Sneddon’s attorney, Jennifer Gregory, said a driver can be presumed impaired under Colorado law if their blood contains 5 nanograms of THC or more per liter. But that “permissible inference” threshold is different from a legal limit — such as the 0.08 percent blood alcohol limit — and the level Colorado sets is not supported by published scientific studies, Gregory said.
Such information could prove useful as the country grapples with an opioid crisis, the Trump administration loosens federal regulations on marijuana and more than 40 states have legalized or decriminalized some forms of cannabis and psychedelic drugs.
“Impaired driving is a major public safety problem that goes beyond alcohol,” said Sean Rushton, a spokesman for the federal highway safety agency, which is tackling the problem collaboratively, with resources to ensure a “comprehensive, coordinated approach.”
But federal workforce reductions made by President Donald Trump since returning to office in 2025, as well as fewer federal investments, mean efforts to expand and improve tracking of drunk driving deaths nationwide have slowed.
The discrepancy in the data may be significant. In Mesa County, Colorado, where Jones and Umberger were killed, the coroner’s office tracks various forms of drunk driving deaths. From 2017 to 2024, a third of traffic deaths were alcohol-related alone, according to data from the county coroner’s office.
When drugs are taken into account, nearly half of the deaths on Mesa County roads during the same period involved a driver under the influence of alcohol, alcohol, drugs or a combination thereof, according to coroner’s reports.
“If you want to solve a problem, you have to understand it,” said Jana Price, a researcher at the National Transportation Safety Board. “If you only know that alcohol is present, it limits your ability to fully understand what might have harmed a person or a population of people. This carries over into the countermeasures we use as a society to address the problem.”
Identify a hidden problem
NTSB researchers reported in 2022 that, among four geographic samples of about 26,000 drivers, about half of people arrested for drunk driving and more than a quarter of drivers killed in crashes tested positive for more than one substance, such as cocaine, sedatives and antidepressants. The analysis also found that only four states and the District of Columbia drug tested more than 60% of fatally injured drivers in 2020.
These findings led the NTSB, an independent federal agency that investigates major incidents, to make a series of recommendations to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration and the states to establish a comprehensive, nationwide data set on impaired driving.
But obstacles remain to create such a system. Death and injury reports submitted to the NHTSA database often contain missing or erroneous data, according to a 2022 report.
According to Caroline Cash, a former employee of NHTSA’s impaired driving division, varying state laws regarding drug testing of arrestees and deceased persons make it difficult to obtain uniform data, as does the lack of proven measures such as blood alcohol level to measure drug impairment, not just the presence of a drug.
“It’s a slow process, which is incredibly difficult when you know that every day that passes risks a lack of safety for the number of people facing the risk of a drug-impaired driving accident,” Cash said. “But some progress is better than no progress.”
Recognizing how long these efforts will take, the NTSB also recommended that NHTSA establish an interim monitoring system that would use data from trauma centers to create a national sample of crash-involved impaired drivers.
The agency made progress, reporting in 2023 that it was conducting its own study with help from 11 trauma centers and medical examiners’ offices. He also helped California establish a 19-month statewide monitoring system, which NHTSA will use to assess the feasibility of a nationally representative system.
Such programs are helpful in raising public awareness and improving the ability of police to understand drug-impaired driving habits, which can help them tailor enforcement, said James Chenoweth, an associate professor at the University of California-Davis who researches toxicology and participated in the California program. But some trauma centers, especially in rural areas, often lack the research infrastructure needed for drug testing and round-the-clock participation.
Still, it’s possible, and he said the benefits are evident in the results of California’s surveillance system.
“If you tell people that 44 percent of drivers who ended up in the emergency room following a car accident had at least one potentially impairing substance in their blood at the time of the accident, that gets people’s attention,” Chenoweth said.
Diminishing research teams
However, since NHTSA updated the NTSB three years ago, the agency has yet to act on this recommendation. Staff reductions and departures at NHTSA last year portend poor prospects for change.
From 2021 to 2024, the agency grew from 600 employees to 790. By the end of Trump’s first year in office, NHTSA was down to about 550 people due to government-wide budget cuts and individual departures.
Cash, who now works for the nonprofit Governors Highway Safety Association, was one of five employees who left NHTSA’s impaired driving division last year. That leaves just two staff members in the division, she said.
Ian O’Dowd, a former employee of NHTSA’s behavioral research division, said he was part of a 16-person team that studied, in part, impaired driving. Only three or four team members are still with the agency, he said.
“At some point, it becomes difficult for a handful of people to manage all the research work going on,” O’Dowd said.
NHTSA Communications Director Sean Rushton said the agency has “the financial and human resources necessary to support its programs, with multiple offices doing this work collaboratively, ensuring a comprehensive and coordinated approach.”
The Infrastructure Act of 2021, passed under the Biden administration, increased funding for NHTSA’s National Highway Safety Program from approximately $667 million in 2021 to nearly $953 million this year.
The law included $750 million to modernize crash data programs, but as of January, more than $475 million was unused. The funds expired in September unless committed through a signed agreement.
A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that nearly a quarter of entities awarded grants in 2022 did not receive a signed agreement when surveyed between December 2024 and March 2025. It also found that more than one in five grantees said it was moderately or very difficult to get timely responses from Department of Transportation staff.
With the Biden-era infrastructure law set to expire later this year, Congress could extend the unused crash data fund or implement a new approach to drunk driving.
In mid-April, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Sam Graves (R-Mo.) said the bill could allocate between $500 billion and $550 billion — less than half of the current bill’s $1.2 trillion — with a more “traditional” focus on roads and bridges.
The bill has since stalled amid negotiations for more funding, leaving future support uncertain.
“Certainly, we’re still hopeful that there will be an increase in the amount of money available to do this work,” Cash said. “Whether or not it happens this year, I don’t know.”
