On April 28, 2025, President Donald Trump signed the executive order titled Enforcing Commonsense Rules of the Road for America’s Truck Drivers. Wednesday was the one-year anniversary. The order directed the Department of Transportation to reinstate strict enforcement of English language proficiency requirements for commercial drivers, to review state issuance of non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses for irregularities, and to take additional administrative, regulatory, and enforcement actions to improve the safety and working conditions of America’s truck drivers. The result over the twelve months that followed is the most consequential stretch of commercial motor vehicle safety policy this industry has seen in a generation.
So..how did we get here? I want to highlight a few real cases that illustrate exactly what this administration has spent a year trying to prevent.
The first involves a load that was quadruple-brokered before it found a chameleon carrier and a Russian CDL-licensed driver. One of the oldest and most reputable manufacturers in American industrial history gave the load to a freight broker. That broker could not find a carrier. He passed it to someone else. That person passed it to a friend. That friend passed it to a foreign-operated carrier. By the time the load found a driver, it had passed through four sets of hands, and no one along the way appears to have asked the basic questions: whether the driver held a valid commercial license, whether the carrier had operating authority, or whether the equipment met federal safety standards. The driver ran out of fuel on a busy interstate at night. He stopped in a live center lane of travel. The flashlights he had mounted as truck lights did not comply with federal regulations designed precisely to prevent what happened next. A father of three died. He was a commercial driver himself, a working man heading home, who encountered flashlights mounted to the rear of a trailer on a dark highway, with no meaningful warning that the vehicle ahead of him was at a standstill.
The second case involves a Romanian national who built a trucking company in the Chicago suburbs. He employed foreign drivers, many of them non-domiciled, many holding temporary credentials. His fleet grew to hundreds of trucks. His crash record grew with it. By the time FMCSA placed him out of service, his operation had been connected to twelve deaths, hundreds of crashes, and federal civil penalties approaching $900,000. FMCSA issued two separate out-of-service orders. The carrier dissolved and restarted under successor entities with overlapping equipment and operational infrastructure and continued putting trucks on American highways. One of those trucks killed a man named Brandon Rogers in Beaumont, Texas, in April 2023 while hauling freight dispatched by a Moldovan broker. His family is in litigation. I have written extensively about this case on FreightWaves. It is not isolated. It is the operating model of a specific class of carrier that the regulatory environment before April 28, 2025, was entirely inadequate to prevent.
Both of these cases exist because of gaps this administration is focused on closing.
On April 28, 2025, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced steps to rescind a dangerous Obama-era policy that had dismissed English language proficiency requirements for commercial motor vehicle drivers. At the direction of Secretary Duffy, FMCSA took immediate actions to strengthen English language enforcement, with Duffy stating that federal law is clear and that a driver who cannot sufficiently read or speak English and understand road signs is unqualified to drive a commercial motor vehicle in America and that this commonsense standard should never have been abandoned.
Beginning June 25, 2025, ELP violations were once again included in the out-of-service criteria, ensuring consistent nationwide enforcement and reaffirming the Department’s commitment to roadway safety. That is the inspection standard that puts trucks out of service. It took less than two months from the date of the executive order to implement it operationally across all 50 states through the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance.
In June 2025, Secretary Duffy announced a nationwide audit of state non-domiciled CDL issuance alongside a pro-trucker package that included millions to expand truck parking, removal of one-size-fits-all mandates, and modernization of driver resources. The audit findings were wild. In California alone, more than 25 percent of non-domiciled CDLs reviewed were improperly issued. In one case, California issued a CDL to a driver from Brazil with endorsements to drive a passenger bus and a school bus, valid for months after his legal presence had expired. More than 30 states were found to have been systematically issuing non-domiciled CDLs improperly. Twenty-eight states and jurisdictions were placed under special enforcement orders.
On September 29, 2025, FMCSA issued an emergency interim final rule closing the Employment Authorization Document pathway that had allowed unverified foreign nationals to obtain commercial driver’s licenses without consular screening. At least 17 fatal crashes and 30 deaths in 2025 alone were caused by non-domiciled drivers who will now be ineligible to get a license. The final rule was published in the Federal Register on February 13, 2026, and took effect on March 16, 2026. Non-domiciled CDL eligibility is now limited to H-2A, H-2B, and E-2 visa holders who have undergone interagency vetting. SAVE database verification is now mandatory before any state can issue a non-domiciled credential. Credentials expire at the end of the driver’s authorized period of stay, rather than for four-year terms, regardless of immigration status. This week a State Department spokesperson confirmed on background that commercial truck driver visa processing has resumed under strict new standards including verified English language skills, a prior history of safe commercial truck operation, and a valid or obtainable United States commercial driver’s license.
On October 7, 2025, the Senate confirmed Derek Barrs as FMCSA Administrator. Barrs brings nearly 35 years of experience in law enforcement and roadway safety, including more than 25 years focused on commercial motor vehicle safety, having served as a Deputy Sheriff in Madison County, Florida, a Florida State Trooper, Florida Highway Patrol Chief, and five years in the private sector at HNTB Corporation before returning to federal service. He arrived at FMCSA with a law enforcement chief’s mindset and has applied it without hesitation.
More than 7,000 entry-level driver training providers have been removed from the ELDT registry to crack down on CDL mills. Over 80 electronic logging devices have been removed from the approved list and more than 400 recent ELD applications were denied due to intensified internal vetting. Fifteen hundred training providers were audited over one week by 300 FMCSA inspectors, resulting in a failure rate of more than 30 percent. The mills that had been producing paper credentials instead of qualified drivers are being removed from the system at a pace this agency has never operated at before.
Barrs has put himself on the road. Barrs recently joined Georgia enforcement officials during Operation SafeDRIVE, working alongside CVE officers during traffic stops, inspections, and a K-9 program demonstration at Monroe County Inspection Stations. That is the FMCSA administrator doing roadside inspections alongside state officers. That is not something that happens at agencies run by career administrators who measure tenure in press releases.
At the Truckload Carriers Association convention in February 2026, Barrs told carrier executives that the agency is going to bite off more than it can chew but the team is going to keep chewing, and that the work done over the prior few months is just the beginning of what is planned to clean up the mess inside this industry. Outgoing TCA President Jim Ward told Barrs on stage at the same convention that when he had asked Barrs during his confirmation process what he could do for the truckload industry, Barrs answered enforce regulations, and that he was doing a great job at it.
The administration has been deliberate in recruiting private-sector tools into the enforcement effort. Three hundred fifty FMCSA investigators cannot cover 700,000 trucking companies without a robust commercial intelligence infrastructure. The FMCSA has made efforts to integrate commercial data tools into its federal enforcement workflows. Those kinds of partnerships recognize what the industry has long known. The data to identify dangerous carriers, chameleon operators, fraudulent process agents, and unqualified drivers exists in real time in commercial databases. Enforcement agencies that leave those tools on the table are choosing to be less effective than they could be. This administration is not making that choice.
Monday on FreightWaves, we are releasing our full interview with FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs discussing the year in review. The conversation covers what the administration built in twelve months, what he found when he stepped inside the agency after 35 years watching it from the outside, what implementing these reforms across 50 states and 700,000 carriers actually looked like on the ground, where the personnel and resource gaps still are, and where the agenda goes from here. If you operate in this industry, employ drivers, underwrite trucking risk, or litigate crashes, you should read it.
The cases still in litigation represent people who died before these reforms took effect. Their families deserve the accountability the system owes them and that work is proceeding in courtrooms across the country. The regulatory infrastructure that produced those deaths is being rebuilt in real time by the most active and aggressive administration in the history of American commercial motor vehicle safety policy.
Three days ago marked the one-year anniversary of the executive order that started it. On Monday, we hear from the man running the FMCSA about what year two looks like.
The post How an Executive Order reshaped highway safety appeared first on FreightWaves.
