Doug Marcello
While politicians debate tariffs and tax policy, a hidden “lawsuit tax” is quietly inflating prices on groceries, consumer goods, and everything that moves by truck—which is nearly everything.
America’s litigation system has turned commercial trucks into “18-wheel ATMs.”
The “hit a truck, get a check” mentality isn’t just hurting trucking companies—it’s hitting your wallet every time you shop.
The Numbers Tell the Story
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been tracking this crisis:
47% — That’s how much trucking insurance rates increased from 2010-2020.
$529 billion — Total U.S. lawsuit costs in 2022, representing 2.1% of our entire GDP.
7.1% — Annual growth in lawsuit costs from 2016-2022. Compare that to inflation (3.4%) and GDP growth (5.4%). Lawsuit costs are growing faster than the economy itself.
$4,207 — What every American household pays annually as a “lawsuit tax.”
The Perryman Group dug even deeper in their 2023 study, isolating the excessive lawsuit costs—the amount above what a reasonable legal system should cost:
$342.9 billion in excessive lawsuit burden nationally.
$3,965 per household in costs that simply shouldn’t exist.
Why This Hits Your Grocery Bill First
Here’s what most people don’t realize: lawsuit abuse hits food prices hardest.
The Federal Highway Administration estimates that every $1 of agricultural products requires 14.2 cents in transportation services—compared to 9.1 cents for manufactured goods and about 8 cents for mining products.
Food depends on trucking more than any other sector.
When nuclear verdicts and runaway settlements drive up insurance costs, trucking companies pass those costs forward. And those costs land on your dinner table.
The Bottom Line
Affordability is the defining political issue of 2025.
Every candidate, every policy proposal, every economic plan is being measured against one question: Will this lower costs for American families?
Any serious conversation about affordability must include lawsuit reform.
You can’t fix inflation while ignoring the litigation tax embedded in every product that travels by truck.
Safety Often Revolves Around Regulations, Inspections and Compliance Scores; While Essential, They Rarely Tell the Full Story
Aidyn Kanagat
In the U.S. freight industry, safety is often framed around regulations, inspections and compliance scores.
These measures are essential, but they rarely tell the full story. For many fleets — especially small and midsize carriers — true safety performance is shaped long before an inspection occurs. It develops through everyday decisions, communication practices and leadership habits that influence how drivers operate on the road.
Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration regulations establish minimum standards for safe operations. However, compliance alone does not automatically translate into reduced risk. Many carriers meet regulatory requirements and still experience preventable incidents, near-misses or driver turnover tied to safety-related stress. In practice, many fleets only begin addressing these issues after seeing the same minor problems repeat across multiple drivers or terminals. The difference often lies in whether safety is treated as a checklist — or as a core operating mindset.
Moving Beyond Compliance
One of the most effective shifts fleets can make is redefining compliance as a baseline rather than a finish line. Instead of focusing only on passing inspections, safety-focused fleets examine how work is actually performed day to day. This includes reviewing minor operational errors and near-miss situations — not just recordable incidents.
Near-miss reviews help identify patterns in decision-making, fatigue, equipment handling or communication before those issues escalate into reportable events. Fleets that normalize these conversations tend to resolve risks earlier and with less disruption.
Training as a Conversation
Many carriers still rely on onboarding as their primary training touchpoint. While initial orientation is important, safety culture strengthens when training becomes an ongoing process.
Short safety briefings, periodic refreshers and practical discussions based on real-world scenarios help reinforce expectations. Drivers are more receptive when training focuses on situations they actually encounter — load securement challenges, weather-related decisions or time-pressure scenarios — rather than generic rule recitations. These challenges tend to surface most often during peak seasons, weather disruptions or periods of tight capacity, when pressure on drivers increases.
Some fleets have found success by involving experienced drivers in peer discussions or mentoring roles. When safety guidance comes from fellow drivers, it often carries greater credibility and encourages engagement rather than resistance.
Clear Communication
Today’s freight operations are increasingly multilingual and multicultural. This diversity strengthens the industry but can also introduce communication challenges if expectations are not clearly defined.
Fleets that invest in simplified instructions, visual checklists and consistent follow-up tend to reduce misunderstandings. Clear communication standards — regardless of language background — help ensure accountability and alignment across the operation. When drivers fully understand expectations, cultural differences become an asset rather than a safety risk.
Counseling Drivers
Another effective strategy is shifting from a purely corrective approach to a coaching mindset. When safety issues arise, successful fleets focus on understanding the cause rather than assigning immediate blame.
Counseling conversations that explore why a decision was made — time pressure, unclear instructions, fatigue or equipment limitations — often lead to more durable behavior change. Drivers who feel supported rather than penalized are more likely to raise concerns early and engage in safer decision-making.
Safety as a Business Advantage
Over time, the business impact of a safety-first culture becomes measurable. Fleets often see fewer operational disruptions, improved driver retention and more predictable performance. Customers benefit from reliability and reduced claims exposure.
In an environment of rising costs and regulatory scrutiny, safety should not be viewed as an expense. It is a strategic investment that supports long-term resilience, operational stability and public trust.
Conclusion
Trucking plays a critical role in the economy, and safety remains central to its sustainability. Carrier owners and fleet leaders influence safety outcomes every day — through leadership tone, communication practices and routine operational decisions.
For fleets looking to strengthen performance, focusing on safety culture remains one of the most effective and practical strategies available. It protects drivers, supports compliance and builds a foundation for long-term success.
Alex Lockie
ELD tampering has become such a widespread phenomenon that sales agents are cold calling motor carriers offering “ELD editing” and authorities are drafting a new inspections bulletin to combat the “dangerous trend,” according to trucking owner-ops and enforcement communities.
Owner-operator Ilya Denisenko recently got a cold call from a company called AVN Logistics Group. Denisenko said it promised “services such as ELDs, dispatching, oversize permits and e-log editing.”
Contacted by Overdrive about the last of those services, a rep at AVN first said they could add driving time to a driver’s ELD after the driver had run out of hours. Later, however, they insisted the AVN operation was performing strictly legal edits.
Similarly, dispatcher Hector Adrien Esquivel Rodriguez got an unsolicited call from a company called Logbook Hub that advertises on Facebook that it can “FIX your logbook” for $30 a week. Rodriguez posted a video to YouTube that featured him asking this question to the company: “Let’s say I don’t have any more time, I already used my 14 and my 11, and I need to run one more hour. Can you help?”
“Yes, totally,” the voice on the other end of the line responds, saying they have a number drivers can text and a team will edit the logs for them “24/7, no holidays.”
According to Rodriguez, “this company damages the industry, and they are a risk for the people on the road.”
Rodriguez and Denisenko aren’t alone in flagging such out-of-bounds activities. Since the ELD mandate came into play in late 2017, this sort of e-log tampering has grown in prominence so much so that inspectors are contemplating new enforcement mechanisms. The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance of law enforcement and industry stakeholders has seen the uptick, and it’s ready to act.
Jeremy Disbrow, CVSA’s Roadside Inspections Specialist, explained what inspectors are seeing now. “Per the ELD technical specifications, driving time that is detected by the ELD cannot be reassigned to a non-driving duty status,” he said. “Additionally, any edits that are made to the record must show they were edited so the edits are identifiable to safety officials. What inspectors are finding with increased frequency are records of duty status (RODS) that are being completely altered with no indication they were edited at all.”
This has created a problem for inspectors, as instead of showing a one-time lapse in HOS records, these new entirely fabricated ELD reports show wildly divergent activity.
“In many instances, the ELD entries that are shown to inspectors are inaccurate by hundreds or thousands of miles when compared to verified source documents, such as shipping papers, scale receipts, etc.,” said Disbrow. “When entire days or multiple days are completely falsified by manipulating the ELD data, inspectors have no way to identify when the driver was actually driving or resting, making it impossible to determine whether they have their required rest or available driving time.”
As Disbrow noted, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s ELD mandate device specifications in 2017 required that log records can’t be edited without evidence of such editing being left behind in a driver’s record in the device. Yet FMCSA doesn’t actually test the code and hardware for each individual ELD in its device registry, all of which initially self-certified that they follow the rules.
Today, there are more than 1,000 ELD models on FMCSA’s device registry.
The kinds of tampering described above have become become something of an open secret, according to watchers. Disbrow said when inspectors interview drivers about ELD tampering, some common themes emerge. Here’s how he described a typical scenario:
“The motor carrier tells the driver to contact them when they run out of available time to drive,” he said. The motor carrier then “contacts a third party who is able to quickly alter the records to eliminate any violations.” The scenario lines up with what the Logbook Hub rep told Rodriguez.
In some ways, this kind of thing isn’t exactly new. ELD cheating has been around as long as ELDs themselves. Paper logs, too, have long injected a kind of “honor system” into HOS regulations. But this new brand of tampering isn’t any kind of honor system, nor is it like ghost logs, where one driver has two ELDs, one under a fake name to look like a co-driver.
Today’s problem looks to have hit industrial scale, aided and abetted by businesses purpose-built to help motor carriers evade HOS regulations.
“This type of tampering cannot happen unintentionally. It is not a simple error in a record of duty because a driver accidentally made a mistake,” said Disbrow. “This type of tampering is conducted, often by third parties outside of the U.S., on devices that do not meet the technical specifications in the federal regulations.”
These third parties are “completely fabricating the record to show a compliant ELD file without any violations, and in many cases, even falsify electronic supporting documents to match the ELD file,” which gives inspectors real trouble, he said. As of about a year ago, he added, there had been some “isolated reports of inspectors encountering this type of tampering,” yet over the past year, “as inspectors have learned of these techniques, there have been many more instances uncovered across the country.”
CVSA has been passing that information around among inspectors, industry and FMCSA “to help minimize the impact of this dangerous trend,” he said. CVSA’s Driver-Traffic Enforcement Committee “took two important steps to help curtail fatigued driving as a result of ELD tampering.” The first step is the new inspection bulletin “that explains the difference between a typical false entry in a record of duty status, such as a driver claiming off-duty time while fueling their vehicle, and an ELD file that has been manipulated.”
The second was a CVSA committee vote “to add a section to the North American Out of Service Criteria (OOSC) for ELD tampering,” Disbrow added. Currently OOS language for false entries “requires an inspector to prove that the driver would have exceeded the 11, 14, 60 or 70-hour rules at the time of the inspection if the record was not falsified.”
That language “will not change,” but with the dawn of a new era of ELD tampering, “entire days are often manipulated making it impossible for inspectors to determine when actual driving or rest periods occurred,” as noted above. In those instances, “the committee suggested to add an OOS violation to the OOSC which would automatically place the driver OOS until they obtain the required rest.”
The change in the OOSC won’t come quickly, however. CVSA membership will have a final vote on the topic near the end of the year, and the OOSC is annually updated in April. This year, CVSA made the emergency move to add English language proficiency back to the OOSC by June 25, but Disbrow didn’t mention any such effort on the ELD-tampering front. “If it is added to the OOSC, the bulletin,” as is usual, “will be released prior to April 1, 2026, to prepare enforcement and industry for the change,” said Disbrow.
Disbrow acknowledged that some among Overdrive‘s readers “will be concerned about a new OOS condition being added,” but clarified that “this type of tampering will not be a problem for any carriers that are trying to be compliant. This type of tampering is completely intentional and often requires the carrier to pay a third party to ‘scrub’ their logs of any violations.”
FMCSA didn’t respond to questions about what the agency might be doing in response to CVSA’s alerting them to the new trend in ELD tampering, yet FMCSA does semi-regularly remove ELDs from the approved-devices registry. Disbrow said CVSA was “working closely with law enforcement to uncover these tactics and sharing information with FMCSA.”
Disbrow also mentioned something of a “revolving door” problem with the bad actors on ELD registry. “FMCSA maintains the list of approved ELDs that have self-certified,” he said, yet as FMCSA becomes “aware of non-compliant devices, they conduct investigations and revoke these non-compliant devices when appropriate. Unfortunately, some of these companies start over under a new name and the process repeats itself.”
It remains unclear if FMCSA has acted on CVSA-shared information on the tampering issue.
Disbrow concluded with a focus on bedrock safety outcomes, emphasizing that this type of tampering could open carriers and drivers up to major criminal and civil liabilities, particularly in the event a crash.
“While it may be tempting to tamper with an ELD to gain some extra driving time, the violations that may follow are frankly the least of anyone’s concerns,” he said. “The larger issue is the criminal and civil liability that will follow in the event of a collision, not to mention the potential injuries or loss of life from the collision. This trend is nothing short of fraud and false information, and the liability to the motor carrier or driver during a lawsuit or criminal trial is a far bigger concern.”
Alex Lockie
ELD tampering has become such a widespread phenomenon that sales agents are cold calling motor carriers offering “ELD editing” and authorities are drafting a new inspections bulletin to combat the “dangerous trend,” according to trucking owner-ops and enforcement communities.
Owner-operator Ilya Denisenko recently got a cold call from a company called AVN Logistics Group. Denisenko said it promised “services such as ELDs, dispatching, oversize permits and e-log editing.”
Contacted by Overdrive about the last of those services, a rep at AVN first said they could add driving time to a driver’s ELD after the driver had run out of hours. Later, however, they insisted the AVN operation was performing strictly legal edits.
Similarly, dispatcher Hector Adrien Esquivel Rodriguez got an unsolicited call from a company called Logbook Hub that advertises on Facebook that it can “FIX your logbook” for $30 a week. Rodriguez posted a video to YouTube that featured him asking this question to the company: “Let’s say I don’t have any more time, I already used my 14 and my 11, and I need to run one more hour. Can you help?”
“Yes, totally,” the voice on the other end of the line responds, saying they have a number drivers can text and a team will edit the logs for them “24/7, no holidays.”
According to Rodriguez, “this company damages the industry, and they are a risk for the people on the road.”
Rodriguez and Denisenko aren’t alone in flagging such out-of-bounds activities. Since the ELD mandate came into play in late 2017, this sort of e-log tampering has grown in prominence so much so that inspectors are contemplating new enforcement mechanisms. The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance of law enforcement and industry stakeholders has seen the uptick, and it’s ready to act.
Jeremy Disbrow, CVSA’s Roadside Inspections Specialist, explained what inspectors are seeing now. “Per the ELD technical specifications, driving time that is detected by the ELD cannot be reassigned to a non-driving duty status,” he said. “Additionally, any edits that are made to the record must show they were edited so the edits are identifiable to safety officials. What inspectors are finding with increased frequency are records of duty status (RODS) that are being completely altered with no indication they were edited at all.”
This has created a problem for inspectors, as instead of showing a one-time lapse in HOS records, these new entirely fabricated ELD reports show wildly divergent activity.
“In many instances, the ELD entries that are shown to inspectors are inaccurate by hundreds or thousands of miles when compared to verified source documents, such as shipping papers, scale receipts, etc.,” said Disbrow. “When entire days or multiple days are completely falsified by manipulating the ELD data, inspectors have no way to identify when the driver was actually driving or resting, making it impossible to determine whether they have their required rest or available driving time.”
As Disbrow noted, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s ELD mandate device specifications in 2017 required that log records can’t be edited without evidence of such editing being left behind in a driver’s record in the device. Yet FMCSA doesn’t actually test the code and hardware for each individual ELD in its device registry, all of which initially self-certified that they follow the rules.
Today, there are more than 1,000 ELD models on FMCSA’s device registry.
The kinds of tampering described above have become become something of an open secret, according to watchers. Disbrow said when inspectors interview drivers about ELD tampering, some common themes emerge. Here’s how he described a typical scenario:
“The motor carrier tells the driver to contact them when they run out of available time to drive,” he said. The motor carrier then “contacts a third party who is able to quickly alter the records to eliminate any violations.” The scenario lines up with what the Logbook Hub rep told Rodriguez.
In some ways, this kind of thing isn’t exactly new. ELD cheating has been around as long as ELDs themselves. Paper logs, too, have long injected a kind of “honor system” into HOS regulations. But this new brand of tampering isn’t any kind of honor system, nor is it like ghost logs, where one driver has two ELDs, one under a fake name to look like a co-driver.
Today’s problem looks to have hit industrial scale, aided and abetted by businesses purpose-built to help motor carriers evade HOS regulations.
“This type of tampering cannot happen unintentionally. It is not a simple error in a record of duty because a driver accidentally made a mistake,” said Disbrow. “This type of tampering is conducted, often by third parties outside of the U.S., on devices that do not meet the technical specifications in the federal regulations.”
These third parties are “completely fabricating the record to show a compliant ELD file without any violations, and in many cases, even falsify electronic supporting documents to match the ELD file,” which gives inspectors real trouble, he said. As of about a year ago, he added, there had been some “isolated reports of inspectors encountering this type of tampering,” yet over the past year, “as inspectors have learned of these techniques, there have been many more instances uncovered across the country.”
CVSA has been passing that information around among inspectors, industry and FMCSA “to help minimize the impact of this dangerous trend,” he said. CVSA’s Driver-Traffic Enforcement Committee “took two important steps to help curtail fatigued driving as a result of ELD tampering.” The first step is the new inspection bulletin “that explains the difference between a typical false entry in a record of duty status, such as a driver claiming off-duty time while fueling their vehicle, and an ELD file that has been manipulated.”
The second was a CVSA committee vote “to add a section to the North American Out of Service Criteria (OOSC) for ELD tampering,” Disbrow added. Currently OOS language for false entries “requires an inspector to prove that the driver would have exceeded the 11, 14, 60 or 70-hour rules at the time of the inspection if the record was not falsified.”
That language “will not change,” but with the dawn of a new era of ELD tampering, “entire days are often manipulated making it impossible for inspectors to determine when actual driving or rest periods occurred,” as noted above. In those instances, “the committee suggested to add an OOS violation to the OOSC which would automatically place the driver OOS until they obtain the required rest.”
The change in the OOSC won’t come quickly, however. CVSA membership will have a final vote on the topic near the end of the year, and the OOSC is annually updated in April. This year, CVSA made the emergency move to add English language proficiency back to the OOSC by June 25, but Disbrow didn’t mention any such effort on the ELD-tampering front. “If it is added to the OOSC, the bulletin,” as is usual, “will be released prior to April 1, 2026, to prepare enforcement and industry for the change,” said Disbrow.
Disbrow acknowledged that some among Overdrive‘s readers “will be concerned about a new OOS condition being added,” but clarified that “this type of tampering will not be a problem for any carriers that are trying to be compliant. This type of tampering is completely intentional and often requires the carrier to pay a third party to ‘scrub’ their logs of any violations.”
FMCSA didn’t respond to questions about what the agency might be doing in response to CVSA’s alerting them to the new trend in ELD tampering, yet FMCSA does semi-regularly remove ELDs from the approved-devices registry. Disbrow said CVSA was “working closely with law enforcement to uncover these tactics and sharing information with FMCSA.”
Disbrow also mentioned something of a “revolving door” problem with the bad actors on ELD registry. “FMCSA maintains the list of approved ELDs that have self-certified,” he said, yet as FMCSA becomes “aware of non-compliant devices, they conduct investigations and revoke these non-compliant devices when appropriate. Unfortunately, some of these companies start over under a new name and the process repeats itself.”
It remains unclear if FMCSA has acted on CVSA-shared information on the tampering issue.
Disbrow concluded with a focus on bedrock safety outcomes, emphasizing that this type of tampering could open carriers and drivers up to major criminal and civil liabilities, particularly in the event a crash.
“While it may be tempting to tamper with an ELD to gain some extra driving time, the violations that may follow are frankly the least of anyone’s concerns,” he said. “The larger issue is the criminal and civil liability that will follow in the event of a collision, not to mention the potential injuries or loss of life from the collision. This trend is nothing short of fraud and false information, and the liability to the motor carrier or driver during a lawsuit or criminal trial is a far bigger concern.”
My note; Doug Marcello is one of the most distinguished lawyers who works with trucking companies. Carefully consider his advice – my experiences as an expert witness has proven his point many times.
– Joel
Doug Marcello
Every trucking company I talk to has the same fear.
“If we analyze our data too closely, plaintiff attorneys will get it in discovery and use it against us.”
I call this The Discovery Fallacy.
Here is the uncomfortable truth: The data already exists.
Your ELD is generating it. Your cameras are recording it. Your telematics are transmitting it. Every mile, every brake, every speed variance is already documented.
The only question is: Who writes the narrative?
If you do not analyze it, plaintiff attorneys will. And they will not tell your story.
This week I interviewed Hayden Cardiff from Idelic about how machine learning transforms this equation. His company has access to 40 billion miles of driver data and over 500,000 crash records.
His key insight: “It’s not like the machine learning or the predictive analytics is now creating new underlying data. It’s taking the data that’s already existing.”
The carriers winning today are not hiding from their data. They are leveraging machine learning to:
- Identify at-risk drivers before accidents happen
- Document supervision with objective, timestamped evidence
- Prove standard of care against industry benchmarks, not expert speculation
- Create defensible records that flip the script on plaintiff narratives
The Discovery Fallacy costs carriers millions because they let fear drive strategy instead of data.
The data is already there. The only choice is whether you control its narrative.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has finalized a broad array of deregulatory changes affecting vehicle standards, inspection requirements, emergency equipment, licensing rules, and more.
Published February 19, 2026, the rule changes have limited impact but they represent the FMCSA’s first salvo at providing regulatory relief under the Trump administration. More rule changes are expected in the near future.
What’s changing
Motor carriers should review the changes now to determine how they might impact their operations. Except as noted, the new rules take effect on March 23, 2026:
- Bumper labels: Motor carriers will no longer need to ensure that their vehicles’ rear-impact guards have a permanent certification label from the manufacturer. These labels often fall off or become unreadable over time, resulting in citations even when guards meet the safety standard.
- License-plate lamps: Tractors will no longer need a working rear license-plate lamp while pulling a trailer. If there’s no trailer, the light will need to be operational.
- Spare fuses (effective April 20, 2026): Drivers will no longer be required to carry spare fuses for powering required equipment. The FMCSA says today’s vehicles don’t commonly suffer from blown fuses, making the requirement unnecessary.
- eDVIRs: Though already allowed under 49 CFR 390.32, the vehicle inspection rules in Part 396 will explicitly allow drivers and motor carriers to use electronic drivers’ vehicle inspection reports (DVIRs).
- Auxiliary fuel pumps: Motor carriers will be able to use gravity- or siphon-fed auxiliary fuel pumps with tanks up to 5 gallons, mounted on the trailer and used only when the vehicle is not in motion. The rule revises 393.65(d) to reflect modern small-capacity auxiliary systems used for trailer-mounted equipment. capacity auxiliary systems used for trailer-mounted equipment.
- Fuel tank fill limit: It will no longer be a violation to use fuel tanks that can be filled beyond 95 percent of their capacity. Modern liquid-fuel tanks have vented caps that can safely accommodate a 100-percent fill, the FMCSA says.
- Liquid-burning flares: The FMCSA has removed the option to use liquid-burning flares as emergency warning devices. Drivers must use reflective triangles or solid-fuel flares instead.
- CDLs for military techs: Dual-status military technicians (as defined in 10 U.S.C. 10216) are now explicitly included in the commercial driver’s license (CDL) exemption for military vehicle operations. Previously, only National Guard technicians qualified; Air Force Reserve and Army Reserve technicians were excluded.
- Portable conveyors: Portable conveyors used in the aggregate industry and manufactured before 2010 are now exempt from the “brakes on all wheels” requirement, provided certain weight and speed limits are met.
- Tire markings: The FMCSA has clarified that its rules do not require tire load-rating markings on sidewalls. That requirement falls to manufacturers only, not motor carriers.
- Vision waivers: An obsolete grandfathering provision related to an old vision waiver study program has been removed from the regulations (391.64) in favor of today’s alternative vision standard in 391.44.
- Water carriers: The FMCSA has removed outdated references to “water carriers,” updating parts 365, 370, 379, 386, and 390 to reflect the agency’s lack of jurisdiction over maritime carriers.
