Legislation introduced this week in the U.S. House takes another shot at DataQs reform after similar legislation stalled in the previous Congress.
Reps. Tracey Mann (R-Kansas) and Sharice Davids (D-Kansas) reintroduced the “Motor Carrier Safety Screening Modernization Act,” which would require the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to establish guidelines for states to follow in reviewing DataQs-system challenges to violations and crashes. Currently, states have the authority to establish their own review process.
The legislation would also expand access to FMCSA’s Pre-Employment Screening Program (PSP), allowing motor carriers to review safety records for both prospective and current drivers rather than just for pre-employment purposes.
“The men and women who keep our supply chain efficient play a critical role in feeding, fueling, and clothing the world,” said Rep. Mann. “This commonsense legislation makes our roadways safer, gives trucking companies the tools they need to strengthen driver training and safety programs, and improves the efficiency of our supply chain. By cutting unnecessary red tape and ensuring accuracy in driver safety records, we can better support both our nation’s truckers and the businesses that rely on them every day.”
Under terms of the bill, if a citation or violation is being contested with a challenge via DataQs, the citation or violation would be required to be labeled to indicate that it is being contested in the Motor Carrier Management Information System (MCMIS) and other relevant databases.
The bill would also amend the DataQ appeals process by requiring FMCSA to enact program participation guidelines that direct states and other federal agencies that receive Motor Carrier Safety Assistance Program funding to provide for an appeals process in which, following the conclusion of a request for data review, an affected party can appeal the decision. Such an appeal would have to be adjudicated by a person other than the officer that issued the violation.
FMCSA last year proposed to essentially do just that with more impartiality in the challenge process, among other proposals.
Since 2009, the PSP has provided motor carriers access to data about driver-related safety violations during the hiring process, but current law prohibits carriers from accessing those same records after a driver is hired. The legislation would update the PSP to allow for continuous access.
According to a press release from Rep. Mann, the bill has received support from the American Trucking Associations, Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, National Safety Council, Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, Specialized Carriers and Rigging Association, Truckload Carriers Association, Women in Trucking and others.
The bill was previously introduced in 2023 and passed the House Transportation Committee, but it never made it to the House floor for a vote.
Doug Marcello
There is a painful irony embedded in every nuclear verdict involving negligent training.
The company trained. They held the sessions. They logged the hours. They filed the paperwork. They checked every box their compliance department put in front of them.
And the plaintiff’s attorney stood in front of the jury and said: “Ladies and gentlemen, they knew this driver had problems. They knew. And their answer was a generic video.”
That’s the irony. The training they did became the evidence against them. Not the absence of training—its inadequacy.
This is the negligent training problem, and it is the softest leg of the plaintiff’s triad. It’s also the one most fleets can fix fastest—if they’re willing to admit that what they’ve been doing doesn’t work.
The Forgetting Curve Is Not a Theory
I recently interviewed Dr. Gina Anderson, a doctor of education and founder of Luma Brighter Learning, about what the trucking industry gets fundamentally wrong about training.
She didn’t sugarcoat it.
Within the first hour of hearing content, most people forget nearly half of it. That’s the forgetting curve—established neuroscience, backed by decades of research. And the industry’s standard training model is designed to maximize it.
Three days of passive onboarding. Generic content. Everyone in the same room getting the same information regardless of experience level. Then radio silence until the annual refresher—or until somebody has an incident and gets a corrective video.
“I told them that. They should remember it.” Dr. Anderson hears this constantly from safety directors. But that’s not how the brain works. It’s not even close to how the brain works.
The Experienced Driver Problem
Here’s something that should give every fleet executive pause: the drivers with the most experience are sometimes the ones who need the most training.
Dr. Anderson explains this through neuroscience. The brain builds neural scaffolds through association. When information is tied to an emotional experience or a long-held memory, those connections are powerful. They’re also stubborn. If a veteran driver learned a technique 20 years ago that’s now outdated, that old association doesn’t just fade—it actively resists new information.
She compares it to eyewitness misidentification. People in police lineups sometimes identify the wrong person with absolute certainty because their memory is built on association, not accuracy. The same mechanism is at work when a veteran driver insists they’re doing something correctly because “that’s how I’ve always done it.”
Onboarding a new driver and re-training a 25-year veteran require fundamentally different approaches. One-size-fits-all doesn’t account for this. It can’t.
Five Principles of Training That Actually Works
Dr. Anderson’s framework isn’t theoretical. It’s grounded in learning science and already being implemented by forward-thinking fleets. The principles:
- Individualization. Assess prior knowledge and behavioral data before training begins. AI can build tailored learning paths based on performance data, driving history, and behavioral indexes. The technology to do this exists today. The barrier is adoption, not capability.
- Continuous delivery. The brain needs seven-plus exposures to build reliable neural connections. Effective training delivers content in spaced intervals across varied formats—not in a single dump. Timing matters too: some people are most receptive early morning, others late at night. Delivering education when the learner is most engaged dramatically improves retention.
- Proactive intervention. The industry’s default is reactive: incident occurs, corrective video sent. But sending a speeding video to a driver who already knows not to speed doesn’t change behavior. Proactive training identifies patterns in performance data and addresses them before they become incidents—and before they become exhibits in litigation.
- Authenticity. This is Dr. Anderson’s doctoral research area. Authentic learning targets the individual’s specific, current context. A generic parking lot video is forgettable. A just-in-time simulation of the actual parking lot the driver is heading to—informed by their readiness to change, their motivational profile, and the specific hazards of that location—that’s an experience the brain retains.
- Connection over content. True micro-learning engages all five interaction modes. The most powerful—and most neglected—is learner-to-self: mindfulness and awareness. Where is the driver’s mind when they’re driving? Are they present, or are they thinking about being away from their family? This is the level of engagement that actually changes behavior. Six-minute videos don’t reach it.
The Courtroom Test
Everything above matters for one simple reason beyond safety: it’s what the courtroom demands.
Plaintiff attorneys attacking negligent training don’t need to prove you didn’t train. They need to prove you didn’t train effectively. They need to show the jury that your training was generic when it should have been individualized. That it was a one-time event when it should have been continuous. That it was reactive when the data showed you should have been proactive.
Check-the-box training gives them everything they need.
Data-driven, AI-founded training takes it away.
When your training platform generates objective evidence—the individualized learning path, the performance data that informed it, the spaced reinforcement schedule, the proactive interventions, the measurable outcomes—you’re not defending with a binder of sign-in sheets. You’re defending with data.
That’s the shift from subjective expert opinion to objective evidence. That’s AI defense.
One of Dr. Anderson’s clients lived this. They switched from check-the-box to science-based, authentic, individualized training. When they went to court, they didn’t say “we trained them.” They said “let us show you what we did.” A multi-million-dollar exposure resolved for $250,000.
The Denuclearization Thesis
This is the first installment in the Denuclearization series. The thesis is straightforward:
Nuclear verdicts in trucking litigation are built on the plaintiff’s triad: negligent hiring, negligent training, and negligent supervision. Each leg is an attack vector. Each leg can be reinforced or dismantled with objective, AI-driven evidence.
Training is where most fleets are most vulnerable—and where the fix is most immediately available.
The learning science is established. The AI technology is operational. Platforms that can deliver individualized, continuous, proactive, authentic training—and generate defensible evidence of it—exist right now.
The question for every fleet executive, safety director, and risk manager is simple: Are you training to check a box, or are you training to produce results?
One approach feeds the nuclear verdict machine. The other dismantles it.
That’s denuclearization.
See the full interview with Dr. Anderson at TransportCenter YouTube or the podcast at TransportCenter Podcast
Tyson Fisher
It’s official. The Environmental Protection Agency has withdrawn the 2009 endangerment finding, dismantling nearly 20 years of vehicle emission regulations. What does this mean for trucking, and where do we go from here?
On Thursday, Feb. 12, President Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced a final rule that invalidates a single document on which some of the most sweeping vehicle emission regulations have hinged since 2010. Zeldin called the move the “single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”
“The Endangerment Finding has been the source of 16 years of consumer choice restrictions and trillions of dollars in hidden costs for Americans,” Zeldin said in a statement. “Referred to by some as the ‘Holy Grail’ of the ‘climate change religion,’ the Endangerment Finding is now eliminated. The Trump EPA is strictly following the letter of the law, returning commonsense to policy, delivering consumer choice to Americans and advancing the American Dream.”
By rescinding the endangerment finding, all federal greenhouse gas vehicle and engine emission standards for model years dating back to 2012 to present day and beyond are eliminated. It also eliminates the start-stop feature in many newer vehicles.
Trucking industry stakeholders applauded the final rule. Last August, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association told the EPA that withdrawing the endangerment finding puts trucking “back on track.”
On Thursday, OOIDA President Todd Spencer commended Lee on his “more feasible approach to emissions regulations.”
“Small-business truckers make up 96% of the trucking industry, and prior EPA greenhouse gas rules threatened to regulate many of them out of existence,” Spencer said. “Electric commercial trucks remain prohibitively expensive and impractical for small carriers due to the upfront cost, reliability concerns, and lack of charging infrastructure. Equipment affordability and uptime are essential to keeping small trucking businesses operational.”
Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) CEO Mike Spagnola called the final rule “tremendous” that will “return sanity to our nation’s environmental policies.”
“It was with great trepidation that SEMA watched our nation’s leaders demonize and ban the very motor vehicles that serve as the bedrock upon which the American people – families, small businesses, and automotive enthusiasts – rely to live their best, most prosperous lives,” Spagnola said. “It was even more infuriating to watch these policymakers brazenly justify their actions with a dubious policy position that now rightly goes away, to be replaced with a common-sense, free-market view of what drives our nation’s prosperity.”
While trucking and vehicle stakeholders take a victory lap, how withdrawing the endangerment finding will reshape the future of vehicles remains uncertain. Additionally, it does not do what many think it does for trucking emissions.
Endangerment Finding 101
To understand the effect of the EPA’s final rule, it is important to understand the endangerment finding.
Back in 1999, environmental groups asked the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases from vehicles under the Clean Air Act. In 2003, the EPA denied the request, stating it had no authority to do so. That prompted legal challenges.
In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled greenhouse gases count as “air pollutants” under that law. That meant EPA could regulate them, but only after answering one key question: Do these gases endanger public health and welfare?
EPA’s answer was the “endangerment finding,” finalized in December 2009. It became the legal trigger for later vehicle greenhouse gas rules. The finding was challenged in court, but a federal appeals court upheld it in 2012, and it stuck.
What does withdrawing the endangerment finding do?
The EPA’s final rule invalidates some big-ticket vehicle emission rules, but not all of them, and challenges are sure to come.
Perhaps the biggest rule on the chopping block is the “Greenhouse Gas Emissions Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles – Phases 3,” which applies to model years 2027-32. That rule would effectively require 25% of all sleeper cab tractors to be zero-direct-emission by 2032. It is unclear how withdrawing the endangerment finding will affect truck manufacturers’ designs going forward. Model year 2027 vehicles will likely come out in the second half of this year.
Those rules and their passenger-vehicle counterparts have been blamed for sharp increases in new-vehicle prices. Since the 1990s, the consumer price index for new vehicles hovered around 145. After 2021, the index skyrocketed to nearly 180.
According to the EPA, eliminating the endangerment finding will save taxpayers more than $1.3 trillion in regulatory compliance costs. Motorists will save $2,400 on average per vehicle. The EPA also claims the new rule will “lower the cost of living on all products by making trucks cheaper.”
What the final rule does NOT do
It is worth noting that the endangerment finding paved the way for regulations on greenhouse gas emissions. Vehicle emission regulations that do not deal with greenhouse gases are not affected by the finding.
That includes rules requiring diesel exhaust fluid (DEF) and diesel particulate filters (DPF). Those regulations deal with particulate matter, not greenhouse gases, and predate the endangerment finding.
Although withdrawing the endangerment finding will have no effect on DEF, the EPA has already made moves addressing the issue.
Earlier this month, the EPA demanded information about DEF failures from manufacturers, setting the stage to roll back rules from model year 2027 and newer trucks. That follows guidance issued last year that relaxed DEF derating schedules. In January, the Department of Justice said it will no longer seek criminal charges in DEF/DPF tampering cases
OOIDA said it “will continue working with EPA to address other nonsensical rules requiring faulty DEF systems that have sidelined small-business truckers for too long.”
What’s next?
Rescinding the endangerment finding will likely face legal challenges that will put manufacturers in limbo.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced the state “will challenge this illegal action in court, and will continue fighting to defend public health, uphold environmental justice, and protect future generations.” More lawsuits will likely follow.
The endangerment finding has survived legal challenges, including in the D.C. Circuit Court. That decision partially relied on the Chevron doctrine. However, the Supreme Court struck down the Chevron doctrine in 2024, leaving the issue open for relitigation.
A courtroom battle will likely be lengthy, putting manufacturers between a rock and a hard place.
On the one hand, manufacturers are eager to produce vehicles that are divorced from current regulations. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents some of the largest automakers, criticized current rules.
“I’ve said it before: Automotive emissions regulations finalized in the previous administration are extremely challenging for automakers to achieve given the current marketplace demand for EVs,” Alliance for Automotive Innovation President John Bozzella said. “The auto industry in America remains focused on preserving vehicle choice for consumers, keeping the industry competitive, and staying on a long-term path of emissions reductions and cleaner vehicles.”
On the other hand, there is no guarantee that the EPA’s withdrawal of the endangerment finding will survive legal challenges. Given that designing and engineering new vehicles requires several years of planning, manufacturers risk gambling by designing future trucks that do not comply with Phase 3 rules. Losing that bet could cost billions of dollars.
The Final Rule will be officially published in the Federal Register on Friday, February 13, 2026 and will be found at: https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2026-02965/restoring-integrity-to-the-issuance-of-non-domiciled-commercial-drivers-licenses-cdl
Scopelitis
The FMCSA will publish its final rule on non-domiciled CDLs on February 13, 2026. The rule will be effective 30 days after publication. In response to the over 8,000 comments (the majority of which were against the rule), the rule makes no substantive changes from the Interim Final Rule. The rule restricts eligibility for non-domiciled CDL licenses to H-2A, H-2B, and E-2 Visa holders. The FMCSA rejected calls to revise the rule, saying that the systematic failures of the non-domiciled issuance process and the need for consistency in how non-domiciled CDLs are issued support their actions. The FMCSA notes that the enhanced vetting and interagency screening required for the identified visa holders serves as a functional proxy for driver history vetting otherwise required for U.S. drivers.
Given the avalanche of public comments, it is nearly certain that the rule will be appealed in court. And it is possible the appellants will seek to stay the implementation date to preserve the status quo during any appeal. Expect the FMCSA to vigorously oppose any request for stay – citing the “widespread and systematic failures” in the non-domiciled issuance process and recent crashes as evidence of the need for immediate action.
Importantly — the rule does not require States to cancel validly issued non-domiciled licenses, but at the next licensing transaction following the effective date of the final rule, States are required to apply new eligibility standards.
The FMCSA notes that the five-year attrition (based on potential length of existing licenses) will assist in mitigating any impact on motor carriers. However, the states have had vastly different responses to the Interim Final Rule, which has added significant complexity to the current non-domiciled licensing environment. This will likely continue while litigation related to the Final Rule plays out, making compliance challenging. Motor carriers should thoughtfully and deliberately plan for these potential changes by understanding, considering, and addressing all relevant risks.
Find the final rule here; 2026-02965
Alex Lockie
Derek Barrs, the leader of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, on Thursday announced plans to radically change something at the core of big problem areas for trucking in 2025: Self-certification of service providers.
Today, ELD providers, training providers, and even medical offices all self-certify that they’re following the rules when getting onto FMCSA-registered lists of service providers.
Barrs, speaking to a crowd at the Transportation Club of Jacksonville, said FMCSA will “work toward a regulatory process” to help the agency “get away from self-certification.” For the remainder of his term as FMCSA Administrator, Bars pledged “we will do away with anything that has to do with self-certification at FMCSA.”
Instead, Barrs said the agency would work on a “vetting process” to make sure that ELDs, training providers and the medical examiners all comply before entering the market.
Barrs gave as an example the Training Provider Registry, talking about the agency’s recent purge of 3,000 CDL schools on the list. While that purge looks like it mostly targeted inactive schools, according to Overdrive reporting, Barrs said there’s much more to come.
“You wanna be an Entry Level Driver Training provider? You just sign up,” Barrs said. “That’s pretty much it. There’s no oversight for that per se.”
Now FMCSA is “working dilligently to go through all the number of driver training schools,” he said, asking “who are you? Do you have the right qualifications? Do you actually have a principal place of business? Do you actually have curriculum? Do you actually have a truck?”
Barrs then confirmed Overdrive reporting that the agency now has “3,300 investigators” doing in-person audits at “1,600 driver training locations just to say ‘are you doing what you’re supposed to be doing?'”
That line got applause from the crowd in Jacksonville.
“If we have people operating schools in this country that are just pushing people through, it’s my job make sure you’re out of business,” he said. “We have no place for that.”
Barrs said driver training is “where the rubber meets the road” and the “number one” priority was making sure only qualified drivers get on the road.
Similarly, FMCSA recently took action to vet ELDs after reports of widespread ELD “editing” from overseas firms.
“We have folks oversees who are going into ELDs and changing logs giving drivers new BOLs, giving a whole new sets of hours when that driver actually should be resting,” said Barrs.
To stop that, Barrs said FMCSA would now vet all new ELDs. In fact, the agency has blocked the registration of 200 new ELDs in the last two months and revoked 70 existing ELDs. Barrs didn’t specify the timeframe for the 70 ELDs removed, but Overdrive has tracked the removal of a few dozen over the course of the second Trump administration.
In both cases, Barrs said FMCSA “can’t stop there.” FMCSA will work on new rulemakings and with Congress to crack down on freight fraud, cargo theft, and other problems around trucking.
Dale Prax co-hosted the talk with Barrs. Prax, FMCSA’s self-described “worst critic” and a Marine Corps veteran, said for years FMCSA has been in “recon mode,” observing problems within trucking but not acting. Now, he added, the agency’s entered “war fighting mode,” where bad actors actually get taken out.
On the certified medical examiners front, Barrs said he had less to report. Additionally, on issues like English language proficiency enforcement and the agency’s non-domiciled CDL rule, Barrs said FMCSA would continue to twist the screws on states, making sure carriers who hire unqualified drivers pay the price, and drivers placed out-of-service stay OOS.
