Read the GHOSTRUCK Act here: GHOST TRUCK ACT
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What Is the GHOSTRUCK Act?
According to the bill’s official description, the legislation would amend federal transportation law to restrict who may edit or annotate ELD records.
While the full legislative text has not yet been publicly released, current descriptions indicate that the proposal would:
- Allow edits or annotations to ELD records only if the individual making the change is physically located within North America.
- Maintain the existing requirement that drivers approve any modifications made to their logs.
At this stage, many implementation details remain unknown.
Questions surrounding enforcement, penalties, definitions, exemptions, and compliance procedures have not yet been answered.
Why Is This Being Proposed?
Supporters of the bill argue that a significant amount of logbook manipulation occurs through individuals located outside the United States.
According to public statements from lawmakers and industry groups, concerns include:
- Hours-of-Service records being altered improperly
- Drivers operating beyond legal limits
- Reduced accountability when log edits originate outside U.S. jurisdiction
- Competitive disadvantages for carriers that follow compliance requirements
Several major industry organizations have expressed support for the legislation, including:
- American Trucking Associations (ATA)
- Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA)
- Truckload Carriers Association (TCA)
- Freight Transportation Association (FTA)
- National Motor Freight Traffic Association (NMFTA)
- National Tank Truck Carriers (NTTC)
The Bigger Question: Who Controls Compliance?
While discussion around the bill has largely focused on overseas dispatch operations, the broader issue may be larger than geography.
At its core, the proposal raises a fundamental compliance question:
Who is responsible for ensuring the accuracy of driver logs?
Current regulations already require driver approval before edits become official.
However, if future legislation adds location-based restrictions on who may initiate those edits, fleets may need to reevaluate internal processes surrounding:
- Dispatch operations
- Safety departments
- ELD administration
- Log auditing procedures
- Driver oversight
For some carriers, those processes may already be handled domestically.
For others, the operational impact could be more significant.
Safety Managers May Be Asked to Do More
This proposal also highlights a trend we’ve discussed in previous newsletters.
Across multiple areas of trucking compliance, regulators appear to be moving toward increased accountability, verification, and traceability.
If legislation like the GHOSTRUCK Act advances, safety managers could find themselves carrying additional responsibility for:
- Monitoring ELD edits
- Verifying who made changes
- Documenting approval workflows
- Auditing HOS records
- Ensuring internal compliance controls are functioning properly
In many fleets, safety managers have already become the final checkpoint between a compliance issue and a violation.
Could future legislation expand that role even further?
It’s a question worth considering.
What Fleets Should Be Watching
Because the full bill text has not yet been released, several key questions remain unanswered:
- How will “physically located in North America” be verified?
- Will penalties apply to carriers, individuals, or both?
- How will enforcement agencies investigate violations?
- Will existing third-party service providers be affected?
- What documentation requirements may be introduced?
Until those details become available, speculation is unlikely to provide meaningful answers.
What carriers can do, however, is ensure that current ELD and HOS practices remain compliant under existing regulations.
Why This Matters Beyond ELDs
Whether this bill ultimately becomes law or not, it reflects a larger trend in transportation enforcement.
Regulators and lawmakers continue to focus on:
- Hours-of-Service compliance
- Driver accountability
- Electronic record integrity
- Verification and auditability
- Carrier oversight responsibilities
As technology becomes more integrated into compliance systems, the expectation that carriers can demonstrate control over their processes continues to grow.
For many fleets, the challenge is no longer simply maintaining records.
It’s proving that those records can be trusted.
Jason Cannon
USPS is remaking its physical network, shifting the legacy framework into a strict hub-and-spoke logistics design.
Article Summary
USPS warns of cash crisis, suspension of vendor payments
- Looming shutdown: The U.S. Postal Service faces a severe cash crisis, having amassed nearly $31 billion in cumulative defaults through fiscal year 2025 against just $8.9 billion in remaining cash. Without structural reforms, the agency warns it will run out of liquidity and could eventually stop paying its employees and contract transportation providers, forcing a halt to mail operations.
- Cuts to transportation and labor: To mitigate losses, the agency has aggressively reduced controllable expenses by $2 billion across air, ground, and terminal handling operations, dropping total network transportation costs 18% lower than fiscal year 2022 levels. It has also trimmed 56 million cumulative work hours and reduced its total workforce complement by over 28,000 employees.
- Logistics network overhaul: Management is systematically shifting its legacy infrastructure into a strict hub-and-spoke design built around a planned nucleus of approximately 60 Regional Processing and Distribution Centers (RPDCs). This strategy includes the Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO) initiative, which slashes over-the-road costs by limiting post offices located more than 50 miles from a hub to a single daily transit trip.
- Unsustainable statutory mandates: Postmaster General Steiner emphasized that internal efficiency initiatives will never be enough to fix the agency’s broken business model. He called on Congress to either provide financial public service reimbursements for legally mandated, money-losing operations—such as the requirement to deliver six days a week to 170 million addresses—or grant the agency the operational flexibility to cut services and raise prices.
The Postal Service is running out of money and could eventually stop payments to its contract transportation providers if Congress fails to overhaul USPS’s business model, Postmaster General David P. Steiner warned lawmakers Wednesday.
Having already amassed nearly $31 billion in cumulative defaults through the end of fiscal year 2025—an amount that eclipses the Postal Service’s remaining $8.9 billion in unrestricted cash—Steiner’s testimony before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs painted a grim financial path for the agency. Without structural intervention, USPS projects its unrestricted cash position will be negative $125.9 billion by fiscal year 2035.
For on-highway route contractors, this financial vulnerability is a threat to operational continuity. Steiner explicitly noted that if short-term cash preservation measures fail, the obligations the agency defaults on will transition from internal accounting metrics directly to external partners.
“At some point… we will no longer be able to maintain operations in the short-term through such defaults, and those obligations that we cannot meet will have to include payments to our employees and vendors,” Steiner said in his prepared remarks. “If our employees, contract transportation providers, and others don’t get paid, it’s highly likely that the mail will stop.”
Trucking fleets are already feeling the squeeze of the Postal Service’s internal cost-cutting measures. Late last year, longtime USPS carrier 10 Roads went out of business, citing the Postal Service’s “significant operational changes over the past two years that weakened the business, including expanding its use of brokers and insourcing its transportation work.”
Seeking to curb its compounding losses, USPS has trimmed its transportation overhead, carving out $2 billion by reducing air and ground transport, tightening terminal workflows, and eliminating excess facility space. Total network transportation expenses are currently 18% lower than they were in fiscal year 2022, marking three consecutive years of double-digit reductions in air transport and consecutive drops in highway freight spending. 10 Roads told CCJ last year, these measures sapped 70% of 10 Roads’ revenue in 2025.
Central to this cost-containment strategy the restructuring of USPS’s physical network, shifting the legacy framework into a strict hub-and-spoke logistics design. The agency is systematically replacing its patchwork of local facilities with a nucleus of approximately 60 Regional Processing and Distribution Centers (RPDCs) and more than 158 active Sorting and Delivery Centers (SDCs). The modern hubs are engineered with specialized package sortation equipment and over-the-road freight charging infrastructure to capture maximum operational density.
Regional fleet operators are also adjusting to the Regional Transportation Optimization (RTO) initiative. Under the RTO guidelines, post offices located more than 50 miles from an active RPDC hub are seeing multiple daily transit trips eliminated in favor of a single daily dispatch. While the optimization adds up to one day of transit time for regional mail, Steiner defended the measure against regulatory criticism, calling it a common-sense change necessary to maximize capacity utilization and control external over-the-road costs.
Steiner emphasized that internal “self-help” adjustments will never be enough to offset the agency’s rigid statutory restrictions, such as the mandate to deliver to 170 million addresses six days a week—a requirement that currently leaves 52% of rural routes and 84% of city delivery routes financially underwater.
The Postmaster General outlined three distinct paths for lawmakers:
- Maintain the status quo, which he warned guarantees an operational shutdown before 2027.
- Execute extensive service rollbacks and sharp pricing increases, including moving to five-day delivery and lifting stamp prices.
- Reinstate a modernized “public service reimbursement” to cover the unfunded mandates mandated by Congress.
“The choice is clear: either allow us to operate as a truly independent agency, free of government-imposed mandates, or pay us for those mandates,” Steiner said, noting the Postal Service underpins a commercial shipping and mailing sector that drives $2 trillion in economic sales revenue and employs nearly 8 million people.
Register for the CVSA Annual Conference and Exhibition, which will be held Sept. 20-24, in Orlando, Florida, at the Hyatt Regency Orlando. This premier meeting offers the opportunity for government officials, enforcement and industry to collaborate and affect meaningful changes and improvements to the overall culture of commercial motor vehicle (CMV) safety throughout North America.
ason McDaniel
Key Highlights
- The GHOSTRUCK Act mandates that only North American-based personnel can edit electronic logging device records.
- The legislation preserves driver approval over any changes to their duty status logs, ensuring final oversight remains with the driver.
- Foreign dispatchers and personnel are explicitly prohibited from manipulating driver logs under the new bill.
2037985262 | Adobe Stock
The GHOSTRUCK Act, supported by NTTC and other trucking organizations, seeks to close loopholes allowing foreign-based personnel to manipulate electronic logging device records, thereby enhancing highway safety and driver accountability.
National Tank Truck Carriers supports the GHOSTRUCK Act—the new bipartisan “Guarding Hours-of-Service Oversight and Stopping Tampering by Remote Unofficial Carrier Keeper” legislation designed to strengthen the integrity of electronic logging device (ELD) records and improve highway safety by closing a loophole that allows foreign-based personnel to manipulate driver logs.
The GHOSTRUCK Act was introduced by U.S. Representatives Greg Steube (R-Fla.) and Dave Taylor (R-Ohio).
Ryan Streblow, NTTC president and CEO of NTTC, emphasized the critical nature of the bill for the tank truck industry.
“Safety is at the heart of everything we do at National Tank Truck Carriers,” Streblow said in a news release. “The GHOSTRUCK Act strengthens the integrity of the hours-of-service system by ensuring that edits to electronic logging device records are made only by authorized personnel physically located in North America and remain subject to driver approval.
“Accountability in driver records is essential to maintaining compliance, protecting drivers from undue pressure, and ensuring that commercial motor vehicles operate safely on our nation’s highways.”
According to a report from Bulk Transporter’s affiliate publication, FleetOwner, the legislation addresses growing concerns that overseas dispatchers are altering driver logs while remaining beyond the reach of U.S. accountability and enforcement measures. Current federal law does not explicitly prohibit foreign-based personnel from editing or annotating these records, a gap that proponents say allows for the falsification of logs and the overworking of drivers.
The GHOSTRUCK Act would mandate that any edits or annotations to an ELD record be made only by a carrier, dispatcher, or driver physically located in North America. Critically, the bill preserves the requirement that all edits remain subject to driver approval, ensuring the driver maintains final say over their record of duty status.
Steube noted that the act is necessary because foreign actors have been found falsifying driver logs to avoid accountability when tragedies occur on American roads. Beyond NTTC, the bill has garnered broad industry support from other trucking organizations, including American Trucking Associations, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, and the Truckload Carriers Association.
“Foreign dispatchers should not be able to manipulate trucking safety records from halfway around the world and put American lives at risk,” Steube said in a release. “Reports have exposed how overseas actors are falsifying driver logs, overworking truckers beyond safe limits, and avoiding accountability when tragedies occur.
“The GHOSTRUCK Act closes this loophole and helps keep our roads safe.”
WASHINGTON —The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) is calling on motor carriers to participate in its Safety Impacts of In-Cab Monitoring research, which will assess how driver-facing cameras (DFCs) can positively impact safety and operational metrics.
Fleets are increasingly adopting in-cab monitoring systems alongside other core safety technologies. In response, ATRI conducted prior research that examined driver perspectives of these systems, with a specific focus on DFCs.
This new study builds upon that work, collecting before and after safety metrics to identify any statistical relationships between deployment of in-cab monitoring systems and improvements in safety outcomes. The research will also map specific carrier and driver strategies for managing in-cab data that improve safety outcomes.
Motor carriers are invited to participate by Friday, July 24. Data can be submitted online or by PDF at this link. All data will remain confidential and published only in an aggregate format.
