Government exists, in part, to “promote the general welfare.” The task of such promotion remains ever a challenge, as it involves balancing competing interests and ensuring some semblance of fairness. In a society where a few citizens have inordinate political and economic power (and thus influence) and the vast majority have very little (excepting by their numbers), promoting the general welfare often necessitates looking out for those who have a less of a voice, those who exist more on the margins and who may as a result require greater protection and support. When government fails to look out for its less powerful and more vulnerable citizens, it fails in its constitutionally-mandated job to promote the general welfare.

Here is one such failure, as reported in today’s New York Times:

As Trucking Rules Are Eased, a Debate on Safety Grows

As Dorris Edwards slowed for traffic near Kingdom City, Mo., on her way home from a Thanksgiving trip in 2004, an 18-wheeler slammed into her Jeep Cherokee.

The truck crushed the sport-utility vehicle and shoved it down an embankment off Interstate 70. Ms. Edwards, 62, was killed.

The truck driver accepted blame for the accident, and Ms. Edwards’s family filed a lawsuit against the driver and the trucking company.

In the course of pursuing its case, the family broached a larger issue: whether the Bush administration’s decision to reject tighter industry regulation and instead reduce what officials viewed as cumbersome rules permitted a poorly trained trucker to stay behind the wheel, alone, instead of resting after a long day of driving.

After intense lobbying by the politically powerful trucking industry, regulators a year earlier had rejected proposals to tighten drivers’ hours and instead did the opposite, relaxing the rules on how long truckers could be on the road. That allowed the driver who hit Ms. Edwards to work in the cab nearly 12 hours, 8 of them driving nonstop, which he later acknowledged had tired him.

Government officials had also turned down repeated requests from insurers and safety groups for more rigorous training for new drivers. The driver in the fatal accident was a rookie on his first cross-country trip; his instructor, a 22-year-old with just a year of trucking experience, had been sleeping in a berth behind the cab much of the way.

Federal officials, while declining to comment about the Edwards accident, have dismissed the assertion that deregulation has reduced safety and have maintained that in fact it has helped, though the Edwards family and many other victims of accidents have come to the opposite conclusion.

In loosening the standards, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration was fulfilling President Bush’s broader pledge to free industry of what it considered cumbersome rules. In the last six years, the White House has embarked on the boldest strategy of deregulation in more than a generation. Largely unchecked by the Republican-led Congress, federal agencies, often led by former industry officials, have methodically reduced what they see as inefficient, outdated regulations and have delayed enforcement of others. The Bush administration says those efforts have produced huge savings for businesses and consumers.

Those actions, though, have provoked fierce debate about their benefits and risks. The federal government’s oversight of the trucking industry is a case study of deregulation, as well as the difficulty of determining an exact calculus of its consequences. Though Ms. Edwards’s family and the industry disagree on whether the motor carrier agency’s actions contributed to her death, her accident illuminates crucial issues in regulating America’s most treacherous industry, as measured by overall deaths and injuries from truck accidents. [full text]