"Decades of research, both on commercial drivers and shift workers, has shown that increasing the length of time a worker must spend performing certain tasks correspondingly reduces alertness and performance," according to Parents Against Tired Truckers (PATT). The group also reports that one out of eight traffic fatalities in 2001 resulted from a collision involving a large truck -- killing 5,082 people.

The measures, announced by the Department of Transportation (DOT) on April 24, do not require the use of on-board electronic devices to verify how much time drivers actually spend on the road, rendering the standards unenforceable.

The recent action stems from a lawsuit in which Public Citizen, PATT and dissident Teamster members sued DOT to update the standards, which have been unchanged since 1939.

OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) also instructed DOT to review "hours of service" based on recommendations it received from the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, as well as the conservative Mercatus Center, which sought to relax the rules. These recommendations were submitted to OIRA, along with hundreds of others, in response to its annual report on regulation, released this past January. At the time, OMB Watch argued that this could signal the next phase in regulatory rollbacks. DOT's effort may be just the beginning.