Cirillo To Retire From FMCSA At Year End
And true to form, she's not going quietly.
OLIVER B. PATTON
WASHINGTON EDITOR
Julie Anna Cirillo, who designed and built the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, is leaving government service at the end of the year.
True to form, she is not going quietly.
"For some reason they hate me," she says of the trucking industry. "I don't know why, but they do."
That is an exaggeration - while Cirillo may not get a standing ovation from the entire highway community, she is widely respected. But the element of truth in it probably has something to do with her style, which is informed, argumentative and direct. Cirillo is an unusual bureaucrat: She says what she thinks.
"I doubt that she will win a popularity contest," says her boss, FMCSA Administrator Joe Clapp. "She's not there to do that. But she has instilled a can-do attitude at the agency. I will always be grateful that she was there."
Cirillo was there in 1998, when then-Federal Highway Administrator Kenneth Wykle needed someone to take charge of the federal truck safety program. At the time, the program was run by the Office of Motor Carrier Safety, which had come under congressional scrutiny due to concerns about enforcement and illegal lobbying by its staff.
Cirillo, then 56, was a regional FHWA administrator with 33 years of experience in highway safety. She was planning to retire at the end of the year, but agreed to stay on when Wykle asked her to get OMCS back on track.
In response to congressional demands for change, Cirillo sent a blunt message to unsafe truckers: Go ahead, make my day.
"If there is a segment of the industry that thinks they can skimp on safety, I'm here to tell them that they are not going to be able to do that," Cirillo said at the time. "We will target the high-risk carriers and we will do whatever it takes to get them into compliance."
Cirillo geared up an effort to significantly increase enforcement and penalties for rulebreakers. Among other things, the agency boosted the number of safety compliance reviews by 200%, raised fines and launched reforms of the commercial drivers license program.
Meanwhile, Congress was moving ahead with plans to create a new truck and bus safety agency, FMCSA. When it was officially launched, in January 2000, Cirillo was put in charge, pending appointment of an administrator. Her title now is Chief Safety Officer.
Looking back, Cirillo sees this period as the crucible of her tenure. "I came in during turmoil and scandal," she said. "The biggest challenge was to convince the people that were here that they were good, hardworking, creative people who could do something good for the American public."
Equally difficult was the task of getting the new agency up to speed. "I'm not sure anybody appreciates what that took . . . with no resources other than the people we took from FHWA. We stood the agency up and got it approved and started to move out with no infrastructure."
Clapp, at least, appreciates the achievement. "She was exactly the right person for the job, in terms of getting (the agency) started and establishing credibility," he said. "Productivity is up due to her management skills, and she has done a lot to develop people."
Cirillo says she takes perverse pleasure in watching the stumbling efforts of the Transportation Security Administration to organize itself. "With all the resources that they have to do it, it appears they are being singularly unsuccessful. Maybe no resources is the way to go."
Looking back, what would she have done differently?
"I wouldn't have taken the job," she says, laughing and then quickly acknowledging that this is not true. "I couldn't say no to it. People who are career civil servants rarely have the opportunity to stand up an agency."
She would have done some things differently in handling the most controversial rule of her tenure - reform of the truck driver hours of service rules.
The agency erred by not ensuring that the proposed rule was internally consistent, she says. The inconsistencies fueled dissent that pushed discussion to the margins of the issue. "We rushed to get it out and people were adding stuff at the last minute. We should have taken a deep breath and said, 'okay, we're going to review this from the front to catch the inconsistencies.'"
But the agency is not the only entity that made mistakes, Cirillo says. "I thought the trucking industry could have been more constructive all the way around."
Trucking interests used all the means at their disposal to undercut the rule rather than to try to provide useful comments to build a better rule, she said. She then softened the accusation: "I don't want to paint the entire industry with a bad brush. We did get some very good feedback, mostly directly from carriers."
Cirillo also targets safety advocacy groups. "They could have been more constructive by agreeing to participate in a negotiated rulemaking."
This is a theme that Cirillo has sounded throughout her career at FMCSA. "We point at others when we should point at ourselves," she said in an earlier interview. "We should make sure we are doing all we can to improve the situation, before we blame others. Why? Because every single one of us is responsible for motor carrier safety."
Hours of service is an unfinished work that will still be unfinished when Cirillo leaves, so she does not count it as her most important rule. She gives that honor to a simpler and more easily measured standard: vehicle conspicuousness. This rule, which requires markings that make trucks more visible, probably has had the most definable impact on safety, she said.
That said, other recently finished rules such as tough restrictions on new entrants to the business and CDL reforms, will have significant impacts over time, she said.
Cirillo has ideas on what the agency and Congress can do to improve truck safety, but she is not yet willing to put them on the record. She did have some suggestions for the trucking industry, though.
"Leaders of the industry need to be very concerned that the bottom feeders are tainting the entire industry." Truckers have a terrible reputation with the driving public, largely because "bottom feeders" so visibly violate the rules. The industry needs to do more to bump up its image, she said.
Her suggestion: Since the major trucking companies already govern the speed of their trucks, they should call a press conference and announce that their trucks will never run faster than a given limit. "Then the public will think, we finally have some good public citizens . . . and you can regulate the outliers, the bottom feeders."
She said she has presented this idea to industry leaders but has gotten nowhere with it. "They come out with these harebrained schemes, like let's have a national 65 mph speed limit. Speed limits are not worth squat."
Cirillo said the agency's stepped-up enforcement effort has improved its credibility on Capitol Hill. "People accept that we are a can-do organization."
But the unexpected thing is, she does not believe that enforcement should be the biggest part of the agency's portfolio. Certainly it is required but it "only buys you so much, and it really only buys you that much with the bottom feeders."
If she were to design a new agency, starting with a blank sheet of paper? "It would look much different than it looks today."
What's needed is a "much more universal" effort that educates people, promotes alternative approaches and employs more technology. Also: a more collaborative environment for federal and state regulators, and the industry. She would like to be able to try new things, such as hours-of-service variations and fatigue management programs, with pilot tests in the field.
The rulemaking process is notoriously slow - and should remain that way, Cirillo said. "Personally, I think it should be difficult to issue rules. As a citizen and a taxpayer I would not like to have government bureaucrats running amok and making rules."
On the other hand, the agency is capable of moving quickly if there is political will for quick action. The rules governing opening of the Mexican border to long-distance trucks is an example. The safety agency did its job on a complex body of rules very quickly, once President Bush made it clear that he wanted the border open, and Congress figured out what kind of rules it wanted.
Of course, at this writing the border was not open yet, a subject on which Cirillo was typically plainspoken.
"When (Congress) put all this crap on the table for us to do in the name of safety, they never believed we could do it. So, we did it."
But other agencies within the Department of Transportation have not finished their work, she said. President Bush could lift the border moratorium any time, but trucks cannot roll until diplomatic protocol and tax issues have been worked out.
Also on Cirillo's plate is a pending regulation that would require all hazmat drivers to clear a criminal and immigration background check. This rule, required by the Patriot Act, which Congress passed last fall in the wake of the terrorist attacks, is languishing in "departmental review" - a catchall phrase indicating either extremely difficult technical problems or a lack of political will.
It is considered by many to be a precursor for a more general rule that would require criminal background checks for all truck drivers, an idea that Cirillo sees through typically contrarian eyes.
Background checks for the sake of terrorism prevention are more salve than security, she said. "From a business perspective, (background information) is probably an important thing for people to know, but I'm not sure from a safety or security perspective - I really don't know how critical it is. If we had run background checks on the people who flew those airplanes they would have come up clean."
Cirillo's retirement means that the longest-running rumor in Washington trucking circles finally is coming true. Speculation about her career plans has been a constant for more than three years - encouraged, possibly, by those who wished she would leave. Not surprisingly, she is leaving on her own schedule and her own terms.
Clapp said he is looking for a replacement.
Cirillo plans to stay in Washington, where her family lives. What she is going to do?
"Absolutely nothing . . .
"Not another job, anyway . . .
"Maybe some consulting . . .
"If it's something that interests me."
That's how rumors get started.
Washington Report continued...
