After taking office in January, president Donald Trump put together a number of advisory councils to solicit input on important topics and build relationships with America’s movers and shakers.
Then came the deadly protest in Charlottesville, Virginia and Trump’s bungled response to the white nationalists behind it, which was followed by an even more confusing press conference that went way, way, way off the rails.
The movers and shakers who’d taken heat for months about cozying up to Trump abandoned their advisory positions in droves. Things got so bad that to save face, Trump disbanded some of the highest profile councils. Other councils imploded, like the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, the members of which very publicly resigned en masse.
So, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that another of Trump’s councils–one devoted to the discussion of self-driving cars–has been equally ineffective. According to Recode:
The so-called Federal Committee on Automation held its first meeting on Jan. 16, days before former President Barack Obama left office. Since then, though, the group led by Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, and Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, hasn’t met once, the sources said.
A spokesman for Lyft said the company’s president, John Zimmer, actually resigned his seat at the table “a while back.” That happened before a score of business leaders fled two White House-backed corporate advisory boards, citing Trump’s controversial comments about a neo-Nazi demonstration in Charlottesville, Va.
A spokeswoman for Google-owned Waymo, meanwhile, said they believe the Obama-era task force is not active under Trump.