Competitive Enterprise Institute and Consumer Alert v. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, General Motors Corporation, Intervenor

Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge WILLIAMS.

Opinion dissenting in part filed by Chief Judge MIKVA.

STEPHEN F. WILLIAMS, Circuit Judge:

Choice means giving something up. In deciding whether to relax the previously established “corporate average fuel economy” (“CAFE”) standard for model year 1990, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (“NHTSA”) confronted a record suggesting that refusal to do so would exact some penalty in auto safety. Rather than affirmatively choosing extra energy savings over extra safety, however, NHTSA obscured the safety problem, and thus its need to…