Thursday, August 27, 2026
INFORMATION BULLETIN
Contact: FMCSA.PublicAffairs@dot.gov
FMCSA Advances Hours of Service Pilot Programs for America’s Truck Drivers
Pre-tests move programs forward in preparation for 2027 rollout
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) today announced continued progress on two Hours of Service Pilot Programs designed to evaluate whether providing truck drivers greater flexibility and control in scheduling their work can maintain or improve safety.
Launched in September 2025 in support of President Trump’s Executive Order, Enforcing Commonsense Rules of the Road for America’s Truck Drivers, the pilot programs are part of Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy’s Pro Trucker Package, an initiative focused on improving the lives and working conditions of America’s truck drivers.
As FMCSA prepares for the full launch of the pilot programs in 2027, the agency recently completed pre-tests with a select number of professional drivers. The pre-tests allowed FMCSA to evaluate program procedures, data collection methods, and driver participation requirements before opening the pilot programs to many more drivers next year. For professional drivers and motor carriers interested in participating in the expanded pilot programs in 2027, please send your contact information to pilots@dot.gov.
Flexible Sleeper Berth Pilot Program
The Flexible Sleeper Berth Pilot Program will evaluate alternative split sleeper options which allow drivers greater flexibility in matching their off-duty time to real-world conditions, work schedules, and their needs for rest. Under the pilot, participating drivers will be permitted to split that time into two periods in any combination, provided the two periods total at least 10 hours and one period includes at least five consecutive hours in the sleeper berth.
The pre-test ran from April 1 through June 11, 2026, and included nine drivers from three motor carriers in Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Drivers participated for six weeks and received $600 for their participation.
Split Duty Period Pilot Program
The Split Duty Period Pilot Program will evaluate whether drivers can safely pause their 14-hour driving window for up to three hours each day when they spend qualifying time in a non-driving status.
Qualifying time may include off-duty time, sleeper berth time, or on-duty time spent at a pickup or delivery location. This added flexibility could allow drivers to better manage real-world conditions on the road, including waiting out traffic or severe weather, accounting for time lost to detention, or taking a break without unnecessarily reducing their available driving window. Throughout the pilot, FMCSA will monitor shippers to ensure the increased flexibility does not lead to increased detention and exploitation of drivers.
The pre-test ran from May 18 through July 17, 2026, and included nine drivers from three motor carriers in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Ohio. Drivers participated for six weeks and received $600 for their participation.
Next Steps
FMCSA is reviewing the pre-test results and will use the findings to refine the pilot programs ahead of the 2027 launch.
Each pilot program is expected to include 256 drivers, for a total of 512 participants. Drivers will participate for four months and will receive up to $1600 for completing all study tasks.
Professional drivers and motor carriers interested in future participation in the pilot programs or learning more about them can send their contact information to pilots@dot.gov to receive updates.
Doug Marcello
In fall 2025, TAEC — the Trucking Association Executives Council, a federation of state trucking associations formalized in 1962 — released an action plan called Trucking Resurgence: The Fight for Fairness and Safety. It was a blunt acknowledgment from inside the industry: bad actors had exploited gaps in CDL issuance, safety data systems, and electronic logging oversight, and the professionals and companies upholding real standards were paying the price — in cost, in reputation, and in courtroom exposure.
Six months later, TAEC has published a progress report. For anyone defending trucking litigation, it’s worth reading closely — not as a press release, but as a sourced counter-narrative to the story plaintiff’s counsel tells juries.
Seven Priority Areas, One Year of Enforcement
The original plan identified seven scope areas: CDL integrity, reforming the safety data system, cross-border workforce integrity, non-domiciled CDL reform, English language proficiency enforcement, combating trucking fraud, and electronic log integrity. The progress report tracks measurable action in each.
CDL INTEGRITY
Federal regulators removed nearly non-compliant training providers from the federal registry, with 550 fraudulent CDL schools shut down outright. Additional rulemaking is underway to eliminate self-certification in CDL training — a gap that has been a recurring theme in negligent hiring and entrustment claims.
REFORMING THE SAFETY DATA SYSTEM
USDOT launched the MOTUS registration platform, intended to improve carrier identity verification and reduce fraudulent registrations tied to chameleon carriers — shell entities that re-register under new names to escape safety histories. The report is candid that the rollout has faced technological setbacks, but notes hundreds of high-risk carrier investigations have already been completed, with FMCSA and state MCSAP partners conducting additional enforcement operations focused on driver training and principal-place-of-business verification.
NON-DOMICILED CDL REFORM
New federal eligibility standards are projected to make roughly 97% of existing non-domiciled CDL holders (194,000+) ineligible over a multi-year period, with some states moving to immediate revocations. This is likely the single most consequential data point in the report for negligent hiring defense — it directly addresses driver qualification gaps that plaintiff experts have used to argue systemic industry recklessness.
ENGLISH LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY
Federal out-of-service enforcement was reinstated, resulting in 27,000+ OOS violations issued nationwide. Multiple states have layered on their own testing requirements and penalties.
COMBATING TRUCKING FRAUD
States have expanded criminal penalties for cargo theft and proposed specialized task forces. At the federal level, the bipartisan Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA) — aimed at organized cargo theft, supply chain crime, and freight fraud — has passed the House and is pending in the Senate.
ELECTRONIC LOG INTEGRITY
Federal regulators removed 76 non-compliant ELD platforms from approved registries and blocked 426 more from entering the marketplace, with work underway on stronger certification requirements, including ending self-certification.
Twenty States, One Direction
At least 20 states — including Alabama, Texas, Tennessee, Indiana, Iowa, Arkansas, and Virginia — have enacted or introduced legislation aligned with the Trucking Resurgence plan, addressing CDL integrity, English proficiency, non-domiciled CDL oversight, cargo theft, and driver qualifications. Many more states have updated policies and enforcement guidance without formal legislation.
Why This Matters for Nuclear Verdict Defense
The core reptile-theory argument asks jurors to see the trucking industry as a monolith that prioritizes profit over safety and only changes under threat of punishment. This report — sourced to a coalition of state trucking associations working with federal regulators — tells a different, verifiable story: an industry that identified its own weak points and organized, at its own initiative, to close them.
That doesn’t make any individual defense case easier by itself. But it is durable, citable context for shaping the broader narrative your firm and your clients are telling outside the courtroom — which increasingly shapes what happens inside it.
The Gap Nobody’s Fixed Yet
The report’s most sobering section isn’t about wins — it’s about capacity. FMCSA regulates close to 8 million entities with 1,118 employees, or one employee per 7,155 regulated entities. The FAA, by comparison, has 46,000 employees overseeing 1.7 million entities — a ratio of roughly one to 38. FMCSA’s 2026 budget request is a little over $1 billion; the FAA’s is over $27 billion.
The Truckload Carriers Association has developed a 10-point FMCSA Modernization Plan — endorsed by TAEC — addressing staffing, a unified registration system, real-time fitness ratings, and standardized crash data collection, among other reforms. That’s next week’s story, alongside a look at what a properly resourced FMCSA could mean for how carriers, brokers, and their counsel manage risk going forward.
NextNav sparks policy debate with GPS backup proposal
Connor D. Wolf
The federal review of a proposed backup geolocation network has drawn intense scrutiny as stakeholders, including the trucking industry, battle over its potential downsides.
The Federal Communications Commission is considering a rulemaking petition from technology firm NextNav, which has requested that a portion of the wireless spectrum band be reconfigured to enable a 5G terrestrial positioning, navigation and timing network that would complement GPS technology.
The proposal, which moved to an interagency review in March 2026, has drawn increased attention this year from groups such as American Trucking Associations.
“ATA, partners throughout the trucking industry and a broad coalition of stakeholders including retailers and aviation, all strongly oppose this petition because of the important use cases of the spectrum for existing supply chain services,” ATA President Chris Spear said while testifying at a June 9 hearing before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Surface Transportation, Freight, Pipelines, and Safety.
The same band of spectrum currently supports asset and shipment tracking, transponders and other systems that rely on radio-frequency identification.
“All modes of freight transportation have made significant investments in RFID-based solutions,” Spear said. “The lower 900 MHz band is used in trackers for supply chain security to thwart cargo theft, track equipment and inventory, bypass tolls and bypass weigh stations.”
Spear stressed that ATA recognizes the importance of strengthening PNT capabilities but warned that any effort to develop a terrestrial GPS backup system must be carefully balanced against the needs of existing spectrum users.
The NextNav petition has generated a range of views across a variety of industries and interests.
“Everybody has an ox to gore here,” said Avi Rosenthal, the chairman of the opposition group Z-Wave Alliance. “You can make an argument that the retail and the trucking industries are going to be more affected because they have more physical devices out there.”
Rosenthal is among the opponents who still believe there needs to be a secondary PNT network. He views it as a critical infrastructure issue. But he also noted there are about a dozen other proposals that don’t require a lower-band takeover.
“GPS underpins modern infrastructure, and relying on one system leaves America vulnerable,” Renee Gregory, vice president of regulatory affairs at NextNav, told Transport Topics. “We’re on a mission to help close that gap with a ground-based 5G-powered 3D PNT solution that can complement and back up GPS with no cost to taxpayers.”
The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee held a hearing examining PNT capabilities in June. Lawmakers questioned stakeholders on the issue, especially its potential for network interference. NextNav said its proposal leverages licensed spectrum and the existing 5G ecosystem to provide that extra layer of protection in a way that still allows unlicensed users.
A spectrum of views
“Most of the opponents in the FCC docket actually agree with the need for backup GPS and a reliable [PNT] network,” said Lauren Bresette, associate director of government relations at the Security Industry Association. “But their specific proposal would cause more harm than solutions, and there’s also debate about whether it would be effective.”
Bresette added that this lower range is valuable to the security industry due to a rule that requires licensees to prove that they’re not causing harmful interference. She warned the change would disrupt devices with long-range frequency connections like tolling, port security and RFID tags.
“Precision GPS applications such as agriculture and construction rely on terrestrial radio links that are transmitted in the lower 900 MHz band,” said Lisa Dyer, executive director of the GPS Innovation Alliance. “Any effort to broadcast high-power 5G signals in the lower 900 MHz band as indicated in NextNav’s application will overwhelm those radio links.”
Dyer warned that it could jeopardize economically important precision PNT applications. She also urged federal regulators not to put their thumb on the scale for a particular solution, since market-driven innovations have already been shown to work for similar issues.
“Part of their proposal is restructuring some of their existing licenses in the band in order to do high-power operations, and then also removing that requirement that they prove they don’t cause harmful interference for unlicensed devices,” Bresette said. “Things like alarm systems.”
An economic report by The Brattle Group, commissioned by NextNav, estimated that a one-day global GPS outage would cost the U.S. economy $1.6 billion and indicated that NextNav’s terrestrial backup would act as a $10.8 billion insurance policy against satellite outages.
“The need for greater resiliency in lifesaving and mission-critical terrestrial PNT technologies has been acknowledged by four presidential administrations,” said Paroma Sanyal, telecommunications industry expert at Brattle. “Yet few proposals have provided a clear path to a robust solution without substantial government intervention or taxpayer funding.”
Beyond the NextNav proposal, the government is also exploring the backup GPS issue more generally and could move on to other proposals, said Bresette of the Security Industry Association.
“The Department of Transportation is testing nine alternative options,” Bresette said. “None of them, other than the NextNav proposal, would even touch the lower 900 MHz.”
Rosenthal suspects the amount of pushback against the NextNav proposal led to the delayed review process, with the typical three- to four-month process stretching more than a year.
Alex Lockie
The vendor behind a recently revoked electronic logging device shed light on the black market for hours-cheating devices — and demand for them from carriers.
- The vendor explained how their device had identical technology to other providers and found signs it was used for HOS cheating.
- There’s apparently “huge” demand among carriers for fraudulent ELDs, some of whom call recently revoked ELD providers.
- The last batch of five revoked ELDs shared technology with 166 others that likely had the same capacity for HOS cheating.
- The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administraion has made strides in such cases, but watchers see more that can be done.
FMCSA has been on a tear recently, removing a total of 95 devices from the ELD registry since January 2025. The latest violation data shows inspectors in new places making headway with ELD tampering out-of-service orders, too.
FMCSA typically announces each batch of ELDs removed, and Overdrive attempts to contact each vendor to get their side of the story. Not one ELD vendor has ever indicated anything remotely resembling “yes, my device may allow illegal hours of service manipulation.”
Until now.
Given the proliferation of hundreds of ELD brands that all sit on top of the same base technology (a practice known as “white labeling”), one question Overdrive asks of proprietors of revoked ELDs is: Do you market other ELDs?
After a published story stated one such ELD vendor did in fact have other registered devices available, the vendor said things took a dark turn.
“We started getting a lot of calls … asking about illegal services,” they said.
The vendor said their company hadn’t personally developed the ELD software or device but had simply purchased it from another vendor and registered it with the FMCSA “to make money.” Their agreement with the originator of the software forbade them from sharing the originator’s name.
“Our office basically offers dispatch services and safety services,” as well as IFTA reporting and other basic services a motor carrier might need, the vendor said.
Offering an ELD thus might have seemed like a good add-on.
But after reading Overdrive articles about widespread ELD cheating, white labeling ELDs, and fleets that push their drivers to run nearly around the clock, they began to worry.
“When we bought the software, we were not aware” of the device’s ability to be remotely re-written, or hacked, they said, but a closer look confirmed suspicions.
“We started vetting [the carrier customers of the ELD] … and saw suspicious activity and then started canceling subscriptions left and right,” they said.
Citing a dedication to safety, the vendor said the company immediately began cutting ties with any business suspected of cheating. The vendor self-revoked the ELD from FMCSA’s registry and was surprised later to find themselves in an agency press release announcing removed devices.
Once the Overdrive story indicating they had other devices aired shortly after (the vendor clarified they do not in fact market other devices, and the rep answering the phone had made a mistake), people began getting in touch.
The vendor got a “huge influx of emails. I was shocked,” they said, likening the market for ELDs to the drug trade. The problem isn’t only that some white-labeled ELD providers market exploitable ELDs, it’s also that motor carriers shop for them.
“There’s a demand for drugs,” the vendor said. “That’s why there are suppliers.”
Yet the vendor’s experience could show exploitable devices are getting shorter in supply. FMCSA Chief Derek Barrs made it a personal mission to end “self-certification” of ELDs, or the process by which the vendors simply promise their devices are compliant. In addition to revoking 95 ELDs, the agency said it’s blocked hundreds of others from registering since January 2025.
Still, hundreds of such devices likely remain on the market. National Motor Freight Traffic Association Chief Operating Officer Joe Ohr told Overdrive that providers in the most recent batch of five revocations “represented 171 ELDs just in that group.”
The five revoked ELDs, in other words, shared underlying software with 166 other devices, according to Ohr, and the 166 others have not yet been revoked. To Ohr’s point, Overdrive viewed the revoked ELD applications and found many of them looked quite similar.
Ohr said he’s flagged all these problems to FMCSA, and the agency is “getting much more aggressive” in taking down the faulty devices.
Additionally, roadside inspectors across the country, slowly but surely, are figuring out ways to catch ELD cheats in motion. Oregon and Arizona, in particular, have found some success. Below find the top 10 states by volume of ELD-tampering out-of-service violations since the new violation code hit the books in April this year, data courtesy of Overdrive sister data company RigDig‘s accounting.
Notably, Alabama and California seem to have figured some things out since the last accounting roughly two months ago.
Updated vetting halts nearly 500 ELD entrants into market, Leathers says
Keiron Greenhalgh
Capacity constraints in the truckload segment of the freight market are set to continue to tighten, according to Werner Enterprises CEO Derek Leathers, because of an under-the-radar federal enforcement initiative — the renewed purge of noncompliant electronic logging devices.
As a result, the upswing in the freight market is set to continue following the longest downturn in industry memory.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration deemed at least 56 ELD models noncompliant so far in 2026, data show. The agency blacklisted at least 32 ELDs in 2025. Each total is substantially higher than previous years.
FMCSA is blackballing use of those noncompliant devices to limit drivers’ and carriers’ ability to evade hours-of-service regulations and compromise safety standards. Federal regulators are pursuing this initiative alongside efforts to clamp down on unqualified drivers and inadequate driver training programs.
“Seldom does industry ask for regulation, but in this case, they need to be certifying these electronic logging devices. You’re going to see a lot more capacity that’s only able to operate today because of its ability to manipulate its hours,” Leathers told the Deutsche Bank Chicago Industrials Summit on Aug. 11.
“The reason the market was so saturated was that 10 trucks were able to behave like 15,” said Leathers. “And so, as you take those 10 trucks out, you’re really taking the equivalent capacity of 15 trucks out because you can’t operate with these extra hours and reset your logs on a daily basis.”
Federal regulations require motor carriers to use ELDs to automatically generate drivers’ record-of-duty status under hours-of-service rules, which limit drivers to 11 hours of driving time after 10 consecutive hours off duty, along with other restrictions.
Noncompliant ELDs can enable evasion of the regulations.
The FMCSA in December 2025 overhauled the vetting process for ELDs.
“They’ve stopped 400, nearly 500 at this point, new entrants into the marketplace because the ELDs didn’t pass the basic kind of sniff test of certification and they were too easily able to be edited or manipulated,” Leathers told attendees of the investor conference.
Doing so, said the executive, was effectively taking capacity out of the market alongside federal initiatives on non-domiciled commercial driver licenses and driving schools.
But industry observers expect further withdrawals, with more than 1,000 self-certified ELD providers registered in the United States. In Canada, where self-certification is not allowed, less than a dozen ELD providers dominate the market.
In November 2025, American Trucking Associations and the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance called for third-party certification of ELDs to stymie illegal falsification of logbook data.
ATA in October 2025 updated its safety policy to support third-party certification of ELDs and oversight of auditing and monitoring of devices.
And ELD tampering is becoming more common as a result of the increase in noncompliant ELDs.
CVSA targeted ELD falsification and tampering during its annual International Roadcheck in May. Falsification of record-of-duty status was the second-most-cited driver violation in the 2025 edition of the 37-step inspections.
Most interstate carriers have been required to use a compliant ELD since December 2019, when FMCSA’s ELD rule took full effect.
Carriers are receiving 60 days to replace equipment that does not comply with safety standards or they face out-of-service orders.
