ederal enforcement now sidelines about 2,000 drivers a month, ATA VP says
Steve Brawner
Federal enforcement of a long-dormant English-language rule is now sidelining about 2,000 drivers a month with out-of-service violations, an American Trucking Associations executive said.
The current enforcement environment reflects a return to a rule that dates to 1937 but was unevenly applied for much of the past decade. A 2016 Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration guidance document was interpreted by many agencies to mean drivers should not be placed out of service for English-language deficiencies, resulting in minimal enforcement across states.
“Basically between 2016 and last year, there were next to no out-of-service violations for English language,” said Brenna Lyles, ATA’s vice president of safety policy. “It just wasn’t a consistently enforced violation across states, across jurisdictions.”
That changed in June 2025, when roadside inspectors began placing drivers out of service if they were not proficient in English, following an executive order issued earlier that spring and subsequent action by FMCSA.
In the months since, enforcement has settled into a steady pattern. Lyles said there have been some minor procedural adjustments and an initial learning curve as states aligned their approaches, but there have been no significant surges or declines in violations.
“At this point, we are seeing pretty consistent application of the rule,” she said. “States needed some time to update procedures or seek direction, but that implementation phase has largely passed.”
Consistency concerns
Even as enforcement has stabilized, questions remain about how proficiency is determined and whether the process yields consistent results nationwide.
The evaluation includes a two-part test. First, an officer conducts an interview with the driver, asking questions related to routine job duties. Second, the driver must correctly identify or interpret common road signs. While the signage portion is more objective, the interview component does not rely on a standardized scoring system, leaving room for interpretation by individual officers.
That subjectivity has become a central concern for some carriers and industry groups.
“We have had carriers whose drivers have passed English-proficiency stops in Texas and failed them in Arkansas,” said John Esparza, president and CEO of Texas Trucking Association. “What is proficiency? Define it for us so that we can train to it, and more importantly, ensure we are putting safe drivers on the road.”
The variability reflects the inherently human element of roadside inspections, even as industry groups and regulators work to promote consistency.
Lyles said the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance has provided guidance to enforcement agencies and emphasized documentation standards. Officers are instructed to base interview questions on a driver’s day-to-day responsibilities and to follow a defined sequence of steps during inspections.
If a carrier disputes a violation, it can seek redress through FMCSA’s DataQs system.
“We work closely with our partners at CVSA, and they have been diligently working on this,” Lyles said. “The procedures are clear and the guidance is straightforward in terms of what officers need to do.”
While the debate over subjectivity continues, the rule itself has prompted little change for many fleets, particularly those that already emphasized safety and compliance in their hiring practices.
“Our policies have always been the same and straightforward,” said Matt Godfrey, president of ABF Freight. “All of our drivers have to meet all federal driver qualification standards as part of the application process.”
Godfrey said English proficiency has long been treated as a basic safety requirement, and the renewed enforcement has simply reinforced existing expectations.
“I support it because English-language proficiency is a safety issue,” he said. “Drivers need to be able to read road signs, respond in case of emergencies, communicate with law enforcement, and work effectively with customers and teammates.”
Other carriers expressed similar views. Averitt Express said it requires proficiency as part of its hiring process and uses multiple steps to verify that new drivers meet the standard. Averitt Express ranks No. 29 on the for-hire TT100.
FedEx Freight said it complies with Department of Labor and FMCSA regulations and supports consistent enforcement, noting that uniform application of rules helps reduce risk and supports predictable operations. FedEx Corp. ranks No. 2 on the for-hire TT100.
In some cases, companies have gone a step further. Private firms have begun developing training tools tailored to trucking, including English-language learning platforms designed to help drivers build job-specific communication skills.
For smaller fleets, the impact of the tougher stance has been more visible.
Alan Riels, owner of Crossett, Ark.-based Dedicated Logistics, said the policy has affected his company in a positive way. His roughly 85-truck dry van operation would not hire a driver if there were any question about English proficiency.
Those standards, he said, are reinforced by experience.
Safety Director Scott Richardson said company equipment has been involved in multiple incidents with drivers who could not communicate with responding officers. In one case, a driver involved in an accident in an Indianapolis parking lot spoke no English, making it difficult for authorities to assess the situation.
Beyond enforcement at roadside inspections, additional policy changes are reinforcing the requirement across the broader labor pipeline.
Policy pressure
The Department of Labor now requires employers to include English-language proficiency standards in job orders and applications for temporary or permanent labor certification for foreign drivers. Employers that fail to meet the requirement receive a notice of deficiency, and processing of their applications is paused until the issue is corrected.
The FMCSA rule applies not only to U.S.-based drivers but also to those entering the country from Canada and Mexico. A limited exception exists in certain commercial border zones with Mexico, where drivers may be cited for violations but are not placed out of service.
States have also begun to take complementary steps.
On June 1, the Texas Department of Transportation announced that commercial driver license and commercial learner permit knowledge exams will be administered only in English. Previously, the written portion of the test was offered in English and Spanish, while the skills test has long been conducted exclusively in English.
Interpreters are not allowed during any part of the testing process.
Esparza said most carriers in Texas have not raised concerns about the change because they already expect drivers to meet English-proficiency requirements. However, he noted that the interstate nature of trucking means drivers must meet standards not only in their home state but across multiple jurisdictions.
That reality underscores the industry’s call for greater clarity.
“The folks I’ve talked to had zero concern about going full English because they had confidence in the drivers they’ve hired,” Esparza said. “But when you have a system that can be interpreted differently, that creates challenges for carriers that operate across state lines.”
Over time, he expects those challenges to diminish as enforcement practices become more uniform and as both regulators and industry participants gain more experience with the rule.
He also believes the renewed focus on enforcement ultimately serves a broader purpose.
“We should expect that people driving in our state should speak English, period, end of story,” Esparza said. “That’s the way it’s always been, and it’s as it should be for very specific reasons of safety.”
From Scopelitis Transportation Consulting.
For years, FMCSA has relied on self-certification to regulate some of the most safety-critical functions in trucking. Electronic logging device manufacturers, CDL training schools, and medical examiners have been asked to promise they meet federal standards, submit paperwork, and land on an official registry—no inspection, no independent testing, no verification. It was designed for speed and scalability, and it delivered both. But in 2025 and 2026, the cracks became impossible to ignore.
The numbers are sobering. FMCSA revoked 37 ELD devices in 2025 and rejected another 200 before they reached the market. So far, in 2026, we have seen an additional 39 devices purged. The agency removed nearly 3,000 CDL training schools from the Training Provider Registry in a single sweep—with another 4,500 placed on notice—after deploying 330 investigators to audit 1,600 training locations. In total, more than 6,800 unqualified training providers were removed from the FMCSA registry in the past year. And, in April 2025, the agency voided over 15,225 medical certificates issued to drivers by two Houston-area chiropractors who had improperly certified them, triggering a joint investigation by the DOT Inspector General, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. Across all three programs, the pattern is the same: a system built on trust was exploited at scale.
What FMCSA Is Doing About It
FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs has declared that self-certification is going away. “We will do away with anything that has to do with self-certification at FMCSA,” he told an audience in December 2025. The agency has already overhauled its ELD vetting process, requiring verification of technical documentation, contact information, and cross-checks against revoked devices before any new ELD reaches the registry. On the training side, the agency is asking schools the most basic questions: Do you have a principal place of business? Do you have a curriculum? Do you actually own a truck? And on the medical examiner front, the 15,225 mass voiding of driver medical certificates sent an unmistakable signal that FMCSA is willing to take large-scale, disruptive action against bad actors. These are stopgap measures while the agency develops permanent regulatory solutions—but the direction is clear.
Lessons from Canada
Canada offers a working model for what comes next—at least for ELDs. When Canada’s ELD mandate took effect in June 2021, Transport Canada required all devices to be tested and certified by independent, third-party certification bodies accredited under ISO/IEC 17065. Only devices that pass receive a certification number and appear on Canada’s official ELD Registry. The result is a much smaller but significantly more reliable marketplace. The trade-off is real—fewer choices, higher costs, and a slower rollout that initially left carriers scrambling for compliant devices. While the Canadian system is not perfect, every device on Canada’s list has been independently verified, which is a level of certainty the U.S. system has never offered.
What Congress Is Doing
Congress is moving to codify reforms through the BUILD America 250 Act (H.R. 8870), the House’s proposed five-year highway reauthorization bill introduced on May 19, 2026. The bill requires FMCSA to certify ELDs against federal requirements. It allows non-compliant entry-level driver training providers to be removed from the registry within 90 days of a substantiated complaint. It directs the development of automated tools to detect “chameleon carriers” that shut down and reopen under new names. And it provides increasing FMCSA funding—including Motor Carrier Safety Assistance Program grants growing from $435 million to $478 million over the authorization period. The bill passed the T&I Committee 62–2 and is expected on the House floor this summer.
What the Industry Should Expect
Should the shift from self-certification to verified certification become a reality, it will reshape the trucking ecosystem. The ELD marketplace will shrink—carriers using lesser-known or low-cost devices should evaluate their provider’s certification readiness now. The Training Provider Registry will continue to contract as CDL mills are eliminated, benefiting legitimate schools that have invested in qualified instructors and real behind-the-wheel training. Medical examiners should expect increased scrutiny of examination volumes, pass rates, and adherence to physical qualification standards.
The transition will not be painless. Rulemaking takes years, not months. The industry should expect a period of uncertainty as old systems wind down and new ones are built. But the trajectory is unmistakable: the honor system is ending. The carriers, vendors, training schools, and medical examiners who are already doing things the right way will be rewarded. Those who have been exploiting the system gaps will find those gaps closing—from both the agency and Congress—with increasing speed and determination.
Connon D.Wolf
Government funding and private sector investment are both playing a role in the trucking industry’s efforts to alleviate the truck parking shortage, a major source of lost productivity and driver frustration.
The American Transportation Research Institute ranked truck parking as the No. 2 concern among drivers in 2025. ATRI also found in an earlier report that drivers sacrificed 56 minutes every day on average to secure parking at a cost of $5,600 annually.
“This has been an issue for a long time, for decades really,” said Darrin Roth, vice president of highway policy for American Trucking Associations. “It’s getting worse and worse because the miles traveled by trucks keep growing, and the number of spaces nationwide isn’t growing fast enough to accommodate those drivers. So, in a nutshell, that’s the problem.”
ATA advocates for federal investment through the issuance of grants, though Roth stressed that it’s a multifaceted issue between safety concerns and economic costs that requires different solutions.
“The private sector has stepped up as well,” Roth said. “Traditionally, the private sector has only provided capacity through truck stops. But the last few years, we’ve seen a whole bunch of companies pop up.”
Roth noted that these businesses don’t always have facilities or amenities. Instead, they leverage technology such as apps to connect drivers to a guaranteed a spot. Still, they are seen as an important part of the overall parking ecosystem..
“It’s so new and so organic that I don’t know that anyone has really been able to get a handle on exactly how much new capacity it’s provided,” Roth said. “But from what I’ve seen, this is the fastest-growing source of new truck parking capacity over the last few years.”
Truck Parking Club connects drivers and fleet managers with properties that have parking. The app also contains information about the property, its features and what amenities are offered. The properties are inspected to confirm they are suitable for trucks, and the information is updated through multiple inspections.
“We believe for trucking and the supply chain to be most efficient, we think there’s over a million spaces needed across the U.S.,” Truck Parking Club CEO Evan Shelley said. “It’s costing the industry, from our commissioned research, over $100 billion a year, and that’s just because of the inefficiencies of drivers not having suitable parking close to them.”
Truck Parking Club has grown its network of providers to more than 6,000 locations. These include warehouses, terminals, repair shops, self-storage facilities and truck stops, with options for fleet manager, dispatcher or driver to reserve a spot.
“It’s all within the same account,” Shelley said. “We’ve really built all the tools needed to be successful with all things truck parking, not just providing the optionality.”
Shelley welcomes taxpayer-funded parking as a way to help address the issue, but he stressed the government alone can’t scale fast enough to fix the problem, so private-sector services are necessary.
“In 3½ years, we’ve built the largest aggregation of truck parking spaces in the U.S.,” Shelley said. “We do think we are a big part of the solution, and we don’t just think that, we have the drivers and carriers to prove it. We’ve parked hundreds of thousands of trucks.”
Trucker Path has provided crowdsourced parking availability updates since it launched in 2013. A few years later, predictive data features were added. This allowed users to rate parking in real time for other drivers. The company later leveraged the resulting large network by adding a reserved parking feature to the app in June 2026.
“A lot of time is wasted looking for spaces at the end of the day, and a lot of drivers end up having to park somewhere where it’s not the safest,” said Trucker Path Chief Marketing Officer Chris Oliver. “But 50-plus minutes a day is a massive chunk of the driver’s available hours on a daily basis. So having good parking is a big problem.”
Trucker Path has more than 100,000 reservable truck parking spots across the United States. The recent update integrated overnight and long-term paid booking options in addition to its traditional crowdsourced free parking availability maps. The approach allows the company to work with partners to overlay its own booking service over existing apps and storefronts.
“The private sector is not funded by tax dollars,” Oliver said. “There are costs involved in the private sector that have to get covered somehow. I think it has to be done. Otherwise, like I said, I don’t think the public sector can scratch that itch fully.”
Chad Krueger
A landmark, unanimous Supreme Court ruling in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC has fundamentally altered the legal landscape for freight brokers, putting their carrier vetting workflows under a microscope.
The court ruled that the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act does not protect freight brokers from state-level negligent-hiring lawsuits.
Going forward, if a broker hires a carrier with a questionable safety record and an accident occurs, the broker is no longer shielded from a personal injury lawsuit in state court.
While the FAAAA prevents states from interfering with a broker’s prices, routes and services, the justices clarified that it does not strip states of the right to oversee motor vehicle safety.
Moving beyond FMCSA authority
For a long time, many brokerages operated under the assumption that active Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration authority was enough to clear a carrier for a load. Those days are over.
This ruling amplifies the pressure on brokerages across three main pillars:
- Heightened litigation risk: Plaintiff attorneys are actively targeting the broker’s vetting process, looking for any overlooked safety flaws to establish negligence.
- Stricter insurance standards: Underwriters are shifting their focus toward a broker’s risk management practices, demanding auditable, continuous monitoring rather than static checks.
- The need for workflow consistency: Brokerages must establish a uniform, ironclad process for how carriers are analyzed, approved and maintained within their networks.
The operational challenge: vetting at scale
Did the broker actively review the carrier’s past safety performance? Were chronic roadside violations or failed inspections overlooked? Was the carrier allowed to operate with an at-risk or conditional safety standing? Were operational and safety warning signs properly documented and assessed? Is there a clear, auditable trail proving the broker’s compliance vetting process? Did the broker discover a safety issue while the carrier was actively moving one of their loads?
These are all questions that will now need answers when a broker goes to book a load.
For most brokerages, the obstacle isn’t the “want” to vet carriers; it’s the sheer volume of transactions.
Manually cross-referencing safety records, inspection trends and operational data across thousands of carriers is a slow, error-prone process that invites costly oversight.
Streamlining compliance
To withstand legal scrutiny, brokers need a repeatable, fully documented system that provides centralized, real-time visibility into carrier safety over time. To build a defensible vetting workflow, many of the country’s leading shippers and freight brokers rely on the Motor Carrier Brokerage, or MC Brokerage, solution by CAB, a division of CCJ parent company Fusable.
Instead of relying on scattered research or outdated snapshots, MC Brokerage provides a comprehensive, dynamic view of a carrier’s operational history. The platform aggregates and continuously monitors critical risk factors, including:
- FMCSA authority status and insurance tracking.
- Detailed safety histories and real-time inspection trends.
- Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories, or BASICs, and ISS score evaluations.
- Operational patterns, automated alerts and carrier status updates.
As the legal landscape shifts from “buyer beware” to “broker beware,” success requires a vetting process that is highly visible, automated and legally defensible. Implementing robust monitoring tools ensures brokerages can protect their businesses, maintain compliance and prove due diligence long before a claim ever reaches a courtroom.
Montgomery Update
