Tesla does, and there has been some back and forth of personnel employment between NHTSA and Tesla as well as both have seemingly intentionally poached from each other.
Doesn't really surprise me. I mean, where else do we expect NHTSA to get people qualified to regulate self-driving cars from? I'd rather they came from industry than just not have any background at all.
Academia? where they have for many years gotten a lot of the expertise to write regulations (in all parts of government). There are tons of industry experts invovlved in these processes...but don't assume that NHTSA has no experts in this, Tesla didn't invent the self driving car, they just sold it. Research on it has been going on since the 80s and much of the delay came down to legal rather than technical issue in years past.