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.
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.
Overseas “ghost” carriers and foreign-based dispatchers exploit a regulatory loophole in U.S. Electronic Logging Device (ELD) rules to falsify driver logs and overwork truckers beyond safe limits
The Loophole
Federal law mandates that ELDs track Hours-of-Service (HOS) to prevent fatigue-related crashes, but it does not explicitly prohibit foreign-based personnel from editing or annotating these records The Free Press – Tampa+1. This means a dispatcher in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, or elsewhere can log into a carrier’s ELD system, alter a driver’s hours, and face no federal sanction
How It’s Done
Reports and videos show that overseas dispatchers:
- Log into the ELD system remotely from outside North America.
- Edit or add “ghost” co-drivers to the driver’s log, effectively extending available drive time
- Manipulate duty status to avoid mandatory rest periods, such as the 34-hour off-duty reset required by FMCSA
- Add false annotations to make it appear the driver is compliant, even if they are working beyond legal limits
These changes can be made without the driver’s direct intervention, as long as the carrier or dispatcher is authorized to edit the logs under current rules.
Why It’s Dangerous
- Overworking drivers beyond safe HOS limits increases fatigue-related crash risks.
- False logs can mask unsafe driving conditions, endangering other road users.
- Accountability gap: If a U.S.-based driver or dispatcher tampers with logs, they face legal consequences; foreign actors often avoid enforcement
Legislative Response
The GHOSTRUCK Act (Guarding Hours-of-Service Oversight and Stopping Tampering by Remote Unofficial Carrier Keeper Act) proposes to close this loophole by:
- Restricting edits/annotations to ELD records to only those made by a carrier, dispatcher, or driver physically located in North America.
- Preserving driver approval for all changes, ensuring final oversight remains with the driver .
If passed, the bill would make it illegal for overseas personnel to manipulate U.S. ELD logs, aiming to restore accountability and improve highway safety.
In short: Overseas “ghost” carriers exploit the lack of a geographic restriction in ELD rules to remotely alter driver logs, overwork drivers, and avoid U.S. enforcement — a gap lawmakers are now targeting with the GHOSTRUCK Act.
CCJ Staff
Truckstaff ELD’s self-certification revoked by FMCSA
Truck drivers and motor carriers using the Truckstaff ELD are being asked to discontinue use of the device and revert to paper logs or logging software following the device’s revocation by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration from the agency’s Registered Devices list.
As with prior ELD revocations from FMCSA, the agency did not provide details about how the device is non-compliant, only noting that the provider failed to meet the minimum requirements established in 49 CFR Appendix A to Subpart B of Part 395. Truckstaff did not respond to a request for comment as of press time.
“FMCSA will continue to take appropriate action when devices fail to meet the agency’s requirements because accurate and reliable hours-of-service records are essential to safety, compliance, and accountability across the industry,” said FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs.
The Truckstaff device’s revocation marks the 80th revoked device since January 2025.
Motor carriers and drivers have up to 60 days to replace the revoked ELD with a compliant device. In addition to reverting to paper logs or logging software to record required hours of service data, carriers have until Aug. 23 to replace the revoked ELD.
Law enforcement officers are asked to not cite carriers and drivers using the device until Aug. 23 and to instead request the driver’s paper logs, logging software, or use the ELD display as a back-up method to review the hours-of-service data.
After Aug. 23, however, drivers still using the Truckstaff ELD will be considered as operating without an ELD and should be placed out of service.
Motus woes prompt FMCSA to pause USDOT number deactivations
Federal motor carrier regulators have temporarily paused the inactivation of USDOT numbers for carriers lagging behind on their mandatory two-year updates. The move is aimed at curbing service disruptions caused by the launch of the new federal registration platform, Motus.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced that the suspension applies to trucking companies and commercial fleets that have failed to complete their required biennial updates since June 1.
The pause comes as the agency continues rollout of Motus, the new U.S. Department of Transportation Registration System, which launched May 19.
“Registrants will receive additional time to complete any required biennial updates and should not worry about inactivation resulting from Motus-related access or system issues,” the FMCSA said in a statement.
The rollout of the Motus registration system and its accompanying mileage-tracking app has been problematic for motor carriers and drivers due to strict access lockouts, critical technical glitches, and inaccurate tracking that has hindered business operations and compliance.
The agency noted that it plans to release further guidance as system stabilization and recovery efforts move forward.
Federal law requires all commercial motor vehicle operators to update their registration information every 24 months. Failing to file the update normally triggers the deactivation of the carrier’s USDOT number, effectively grounding its operations, along with potential civil penalties.
Motor carriers facing immediate technical issues or registration inquiries can reach the FMCSA Registration Customer Service Center at 1-800-832-5660 or submit an online request through the agency’s webform.
Ryan Witkowski
A new bill introduced targets foreign meddling with electronic logging device records. On Monday, June 22, U.S. Representatives Greg Steube, R-Fla., and Dave Taylor, R-Ohio, introduced the Guarding Hours-of-Service Oversight and Stopping Tampering by Remote Unofficial Carrier Keeper Act, HR9369. The bill seeks to reform the ELD system to prevent bad actors outside the country from exploiting drivers.
“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 statement. “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.” Tabbed the GHOSTRUCK Act, the proposed bill would require that any edits to an ELD record be made by a carrier, dispatcher or driver physically located in North America. Additionally, the bill would keep the existing requirement that all edits are subject to driver approval.
According to the lawmakers, some foreign-based dispatchers exploit this regulatory loophole to remotely manipulate an ELD, enabling drivers to exceed federally mandated hours-of-service limits while remaining beyond the reach of U.S. enforcement authorities.
“Beyond powering our nation’s supply chain and economy, our nation’s truck drivers share the road with American families, and there’s nothing more important than ensuring everyone reaches their destinations safely,” Taylor said. “I am proud to join Rep. Steube in introducing the GHOSTRUCK Act to hold bad actors accountable for tampering with electronic logging devices, enhance accountability on the road, and ultimately make American roads safe again.”
The proposed legislation is supported by multiple industry groups, including the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. The Association called the bill “commonsense legislation” and urged lawmakers to pass it quickly.
“OOIDA is proud to support Representative Greg Steube’s GHOSTRUCK Act, which would prevent foreign nationals in places like Eastern Europe and Asia from altering the ELD records of American truckers,” OOIDA President Todd Spencer said. “Importantly, the bill ensures that a driver has final approval for any edits suggested by their motor carrier. Together, these provisions will improve highway safety, reduce driver coercion and help combat freight fraud.”
The proposed legislation isn’t the only bit of recent ELD news that will impact truckers.
Last week, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced it would be rescinding the regulation that requires carriers to maintain a physical copy of their ELD owner’s manual with them in the truck.
“There is no readily apparent benefit to continuing to require that the user’s manual be in the CMV given the use of ELDs since December 2019,” the agency said. “This final rule eliminates a regulatory burden on motor carriers without compromising safety.”
The new regulation will go into effect on July 22.
