In America, the government is rarely doing the job it claims to do with the millions it takes from us in taxes, such as building and maintaining safe roadways. Instead, citizens are robbed twice: first financially, then of their rights, as the state justifies its existence through promises it routinely fails to keep. The people actually making our world spin around, time and time again, are everyday citizens, stepping up to do the work in its place.
Such is the case with safety advocate Steve Eimers. In 2016, Eimers’s daughter, Hannah Eimers, was fatally injured when a Lindsay X-Lite guardrail end terminal speared her vehicle during a crash. The device had been approved by regulators, installed by state transportation departments, and certified as safe. It wasn’t. She died because a government-approved safety system failed in the most catastrophic way possible.
Rather than accepting the explanation that her death was a tragic anomaly, Steve Eimers investigated. He uncovered manipulated crash tests, regulatory rubber-stamping, and a safety culture more concerned with liability management than human life. His advocacy led to X-Lite guardrails being banned in every U.S. state and Canadian province. The Department of Transportation spent roughly $100 million replacing them — quietly acknowledging what regulators had denied for years.
Hannah Eimers’s case also helped spur federal legislation aimed at restoring integrity to crash testing. None of this happened because agencies self-corrected. It happened because a private citizen refused to let the government hide behind procedure, immunity, and opacity.
Recently, Steve Eimers went viral online with his latest investigative discovery. In the video, he highlights what he calls the “single worst guardrail in America” and goes on to note that it is owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority. As he points out, the TVA has a lengthy, bloody record when it comes to the ways its operations have gotten Americans killed. Eimers recalls an incident in which the government-backed monopoly spilled 1.1 billion gallons of toxic fly ash into the environment and then blocked their own workers from wearing personal protective equipment to clean it up, as they didn’t want to tip off the community to their environmental disaster. Needless to say, a lot of people died.
His point seems to be clear: this is an agency that doesn’t care about the lives whose taxes fund its operations. It has treated Americans as disposable when their crappy work led to disaster in the past, and they’ll do it again. Eimers then meticulously describes the overt issues with the rail’s design, rigidity, and placement, ultimately concluding the device is a roadside hazard that will worsen crashes rather than mitigate them.
It’s the kind of danger most drivers would never notice, and precisely the kind the public assumes government agencies are paid to prevent.
Tennessee’s roadways have historically had higher traffic fatality rates than the national average, meaning deaths per miles driven occur at a greater frequency in the Volunteer State than across the country as a whole. According to federal data normalized by vehicle miles traveled, the state’s fatality rate has been reported at about 1.41 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, compared with a national rate near 1.20 per 100 million vehicle miles in recent years. But few seem to pause and ask why that is the case. Like Eimers, I have also lost a loved one to a car crash, and I believe our failure to hold agencies contributing to these deaths accountable is unacceptable.
TVA is already facing mounting criticism for its failures in the energy sector — cost overruns, unreliable service, lack of transparency, and resistance to oversight. What Eimers’s video highlights is that these failures are not isolated. They reflect a deeper institutional problem common to government monopolies with insulation from consequences.
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TVA does not face meaningful competition. It enjoys guaranteed funding, legal protections, and political cover that private entities simply do not. When such an institution fails, it doesn’t fail incrementally — it fails at scale. And when it comes to infrastructure, those failures don’t just cost money. They put lives at risk.
The same culture that produces unreliable energy delivery and ballooning costs also produces dangerous infrastructure left unaddressed until someone forces the issue. If Eimers hadn’t spoken up, this guardrail would remain exactly where it is: dangerous, unnoticed, and defended by bureaucratic inertia.