GRAND JUNCTION, COLO. — The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has not implemented a 2021 recommendation from the National Transportation Safety Board to establish a comprehensive, nationwide dataset on impaired driving, three years after the recommendation was issued. Federal highway safety officials have long tracked the role of alcohol in fatal crashes but do not track deaths involving a driver under the influence of drugs or a combination of drugs and alcohol.

"Impaired driving is a top public safety issue that extends beyond alcohol," said Sean Rushton, spokesperson for the federal highway safety agency. He said the agency is tackling impaired driving collaboratively, with resources to ensure a comprehensive and coordinated approach.

In 2022, NTSB researchers reported that about half of drivers arrested for impaired driving and more than a quarter of drivers killed in crashes across four geographical samples tested positive for more than one substance. Only four states and the District of Columbia drug-tested more than 60% of fatally injured drivers in 2020, according to an NTSB report. The same report found that NHTSA fatality and injury reports often contain missing or erroneous data.

"If you want to solve a problem, you need to understand the problem. If you only know that alcohol is present, then it limits your ability to fully understand what might have been impairing a person or a population of people. It trickles into the countermeasures that we use as a society to address the problem," said Jana Price, a National Transportation Safety Board researcher.

The NTSB recommended that NHTSA build an interim surveillance system using data from trauma centers to create a national sample of crash-involved impaired drivers. In 2023, NHTSA reported that it was conducting a study with the help of 11 trauma centers and medical examiner offices. The agency also helped California establish a 19-month statewide surveillance system to evaluate the feasibility of a nationally representative impaired-driving surveillance system. "If you go out there and tell people that 44% of drivers who ended up in the ER from a car accident had at least one potentially impairing substance in their blood at the time of the accident, that gets people's attention," said James Chenoweth, an associate professor at University of California-Davis.

President Donald Trump's cuts to the federal workforce since 2025 and decreased federal investments have slowed efforts to expand and improve national tracking of impaired-driving deaths. From 2021 to 2024, NHTSA's workforce grew from 600 employees to 790 employees. At the end of 2025, the workforce had dropped to about 550 employees due to government-wide cuts and staff departures. In 2025, five employees left the agency's impaired-driving division, leaving just two staff members in that division, according to former employee Caroline Cash. Ian O'Dowd was part of a team of 16 people in the agency's behavioral research division who studied impaired driving, and only three or four team members remain.

In September 2024, two state transportation workers, Nathan Jones and Trent Umberger, were replacing a sign on the shoulder of U.S. Highway 6 in western Colorado when a Jeep Grand Cherokee swerved off the road and struck them. Both workers died, along with a passenger in the Jeep. Tests found that Patrick Sneddon, then 59, had oxycodone and six times Colorado's presumed impairment threshold for THC in his blood at the time of the crash. Sneddon pleaded guilty and is serving 30 years in prison on three counts of vehicular homicide and other charges. From 2017 through 2024, a third of traffic deaths in Mesa County involved alcohol alone, and nearly half involved a driver intoxicated with alcohol, drugs, or a combination, according to county coroner's office data.