ew American automobiles will be required, beginning in the next decade, to be equipped with air bags. To some, including apparently the secretary of transportation, this is a natural and desirable step in the orderly development of better safety practices for the highway. In fact, the agency responsible for the air bag-the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)-promoted that innovation as an almost inevitable product of the way in which the agency has been staffed, organized, and led. Of the various ways of improving highway safety, reengineering the car is but one. It may or may not be the most effective way. Why, then, shall we have the air bags? While charged with a specific goal of reducing highway deaths and injuries, NHTSA was left by Congress with broad discretionary authority in determining the approach it should take in attaining that goal. In the period following its inception in 1966, NHTSA had to choose among the alternatives which could help accomplish its end. Any one or all of three factors-automobile drivers and their passengers, the vehicles, and the highway environmentmight be changed so as to decrease traffic accidents and deaths. Programs designed to reduce the level of human failure include driver educational programs, law enforcement assistance grants, and the rehabilitation and treatment of problem drinkers who drive. Efforts aimed at reducing the dangers stemming from the unsafe vehicle involve the promulgation of federal motor vehicle safety standards for individual automobile components (e.g., dashboard, steering wheels, head restraints, tires, doors). Finally, programs to improve the highway environment center upon reducing the dangers of the roadside (e.g., concrete bridges, sign posts, guardrails, traffic signals) or upon increasing and upgrading the availability and quality of safety resources for motorists (e.g., emergency medical treatment to accident victims). In this area, NHTSA shares responsibility with the Federal Highway Administration. FHWA holds primary responsibility for changing road construction and eliminating hazards while NHTSA is accountable for stimulating programs directed at improved safety resources for motorists. * How do the professional backgrounds of regulators affect the types of regulations they impose? This article addresses the question through a study of one of the most important federal regulatory agencies created during the consumer movement of the 1960's-the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Personal observation by the author of this agency's operation in 1976, ten years after its inception, led him to conclude that its professional engineers play a dominant role in definition of goals and in formulation of policy and operational methods. The article concludes with a case study of NHTSA's recent efforts to mandate air bags for all cars-a regulation consistent with the engineering bias of the organization.