The federal government is playing catch-up on a crisis this industry has been screaming about for years. The question isn’t whether the crackdown is welcome. The question is whether it goes deep enough to actually fix the broken licensing infrastructure that made all of this possible in the first place.
America’s highways have become a testing ground for unqualified drivers operating 80,000-pound weapons, and the blame falls squarely on a commercial driver licensing system so broken that it has become an open door rather than a professional barrier. From fraudulent training schools running fast-track and eight-hour ELDT programs to law enforcement officers taking bribes to pass failing students, the infrastructure designed to ensure only qualified drivers earn CDLs collapsed into a profit-driven assembly line that prioritized processing over public safety.
I had a few minutes with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy at the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville last week, and what he said about CDL training was blunt. The shady schools have to go. Training matters. Washington is no longer looking the other way. That conversation happened against the backdrop of the most aggressive federal crackdown on CDL mills in the program’s history, and after months of watching real-world consequences pile up on the nation’s highways, the urgency in that room felt earned.
The September 2024 Florida Turnpike crash that killed three people is the kind of event that resets how you look at all of this. The truck driver, in the U.S. since 2018 with a California CDL, made an illegal U-turn on the highway, creating an unavoidable obstacle that led to a fatal underride collision. A minivan hit the side of the rig and went under the trailer. Three people died. This wasn’t an isolated incident. It was the predictable result of licensing standards so compromised that they had lost all meaning as a safety barrier.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Entry-Level Driver Training regulations, implemented February 7, 2022, promised to establish national standards for commercial driver education. Instead, regulators issued a curriculum framework with no minimum training hours, creating a system in which training providers could theoretically complete ELDT requirements in a matter of hours while claiming federal compliance.
There are no specific hours of training required for ELDT. Drivers must receive training in 30-plus theory topics and receive hands-on driving skills training until the driver is “proficient,” as determined by the training provider. That regulatory void allowed training providers to define proficiency however they chose, with predictable results. The American Trucking Associations’ messaging that there are no minimum training hours required and that no new exorbitant costs are associated with ELDT revealed the industry’s true priorities: removing barriers rather than ensuring competence. ELDT became a paperwork exercise that provided legal cover while producing inadequately trained drivers.
Federal investigations have laid bare how deeply the commercial driver training industry was hollowed out by criminal operators. The Skyline CDL School scandal provided the blueprint. Skyline, operating in Washington and Oregon, paid cash bribes to an independent CDL examiner named Jason Hodson. Gold envelopes stuffed with cash, each marked with a student’s date of birth, were couriered from Skyline directly to Hodson. In many cases, students didn’t even show up for their tests, yet they were recorded as having passed. Between April 2023 and September 2024, Hodson recorded 877 exams, 822 of which came from Skyline. When those students were retested, 80% failed. When Washington shut Skyline down, it simply continued operating in Oregon. That’s what regulatory arbitrage looks like in practice.
The fraud extended well beyond individual schools. In Massachusetts, two current and two former state police troopers were charged in connection with a conspiracy to give passing scores to CDL applicants, including individuals who failed or never took the skills test, in exchange for bribes that included free spring water, a new driveway and a snowblower. The scheme used code words like “golden handshake” to identify applicants who would receive automatic passing scores. One trooper described an applicant as “brain dead” and “horrible” before passing him in exchange for a household appliance. In a separate case, Tsymbalenko pleaded guilty in October 2023 to bribery involving programs receiving federal funds and to witness tampering after bribing a CDL examiner to pass students who had failed or didn’t take their tests.
The original CDL mill scandal, the one that set the template for all the others, was in Illinois in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Former Governor George Ryan, who had previously served as Illinois Secretary of State, was indicted after a five-year investigation revealed that CDLs were sold under his watch, with the proceeds funneled into campaign coffers. One of those purchased licenses ended up in the hands of a driver involved in a fatal crash. Lives were literally sold for votes and political power, and Ryan allegedly worked to kill the investigation rather than fix the problem. That was the model. Everything since has been a variation on the same theme.
The foundation of CDL licensing problems starts even earlier, at the teenage level. Approximately 13 states don’t require behind-the-wheel training for regular driver’s licenses, allowing teenagers to get licensed at 16 with minimal or no practical experience, then pursue CDLs at 18 with inadequate foundational skills. Arkansas requires no driver’s education. Florida requires a four-hour Traffic Law and Substance Abuse Education course, but no behind-the-wheel training. Kentucky requires nothing. These states create a pipeline from no formal training straight to commercial licensing, with minimal competency assessment at any stage.
One of the most significant competency filters in CDL licensing, manual transmission proficiency, was quietly eliminated through technology. Less than a decade ago, only 10% of heavy-duty trucks had automatic transmissions. Now more than 95% of OEM-manufactured Class 8 trucks are automatic. That shift removed a crucial barrier, while the industry simultaneously pushed driver-shortage narratives to justify lowering training standards. The result was a generation of drivers who would have washed out on manual transmission requirements 20 years ago, now holding CDLs and operating equipment they are fundamentally unprepared to handle in emergencies.
The Florida crash also spotlighted cultural and communication failures that current training standards never addressed. The driver had entered the U.S. illegally in 2018 and had been in immigration proceedings ever since. Despite federal requirements for English Language Proficiency assessments, enforcement had been inconsistent at best. A July 3, 2025, roadside inspection by New Mexico State Police turned up a speeding ticket with no indication that an ELP assessment was conducted. That gap between requirement and enforcement is where people get killed.
Then Washington showed up. By December 2025, the FMCSA had reviewed 16,000 CDL training providers nationwide and removed nearly 3,000 from the Training Provider Registry for failing to meet curriculum standards or for falsifying student data. Then on February 18, 2026, Duffy announced the results of a five-day operation in which FMCSA mobilized more than 300 investigators across all 50 states to conduct 1,426 on-site investigations. The results? More than 550 sham CDL schools received notices of proposed removal. Another 109 training providers voluntarily removed themselves from the registry the moment they heard investigators were on the way. All told, the administration has now closed or warned more than 7,500 CDL training operations that failed to meet readiness standards.
The findings were as wild as you’d now expect. Instructors who didn’t hold the correct licenses for the vehicles they were teaching. Schools are using vehicles that don’t align with the training they offer. Incomplete assessments. Schools that openly admitted to investigators they didn’t even meet their own state’s requirements. One school removed for safety violations had previously provided training for school bus drivers.
OOIDA President Todd Spencer said CDL mills fueled a destructive churn driven by the false narrative of a nationwide truck driver shortage, and rather than fix retention problems and working conditions, some in the industry chose to cut corners and push undertrained drivers onto the road. That’s exactly right. The driver shortage was always more fiction than fact, manufactured by people who wanted cheap labor and were willing to compromise public safety to get it.
At MATS, Duffy was direct with the drivers in that room. He announced a new rule preventing non-English speakers from ever obtaining a CDL, declared a crackdown on ghost offices and Principal Place of Business fraud, and told truckers that spot rates will rise as the systemic fraud is rolled back. FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs removed bilingual signage from the agency’s exhibit on the show floor. These are not symbolic gestures. They are structural changes to a licensing architecture that had been deliberately weakened for years.
Dalilah’s Law is the legislative piece of this puzzle. Named for Dalilah Coleman, who was five years old when a truck driven by an Indian national who had entered the U.S. illegally slammed into her family’s car on Highway 395 in San Bernardino County in June 2024, the bill passed the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on March 18, 2026, on a 35-26 party-line vote. It would restrict non-domiciled CDLs to U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, and holders of H-2A, H-2B, or E-2 visas, codifying into statute what FMCSA’s March 16 final rule already put into regulation. It would also end CDL school self-certification, requiring all providers to recertify within 18 months, and impose federal highway funding penalties of up to 12% on non-compliant states. FMCSA’s own projections suggest the non-domiciled rule alone will push approximately 200,000 drivers out of the workforce over time.
Operation SafeDRIVE is already producing results on the ground. The initiative’s first wave lasted three days and removed nearly 2,000 unqualified truckers across 26 states and Washington, D.C. In one Missouri incident documented by Rep. Sam Graves in late February, an 80,000-pound truck was seen driving the wrong way for miles on a divided highway. The Missouri State Highway Patrol stopped it before anyone was killed. The driver failed to demonstrate English language proficiency and couldn’t identify road signage. That’s not a language barrier. That’s a public safety emergency operating with a federal credential.
The NTSB has documented this for years. Systematic training failures contribute directly to fatal crashes. One investigation found that a trucking company had created fictitious driver accounts in its ELD system to enable drivers to operate far beyond federal hours-of-service limits. That wasn’t a training failure in isolation. It was evidence of a broader industry culture where companies weren’t held accountable because the licensing infrastructure itself had been degraded to the point of meaninglessness.
None of what the administration is doing right now is sufficient on its own, and Duffy knows it. The federal government is addressing symptoms at a scale and speed that has to be acknowledged, but the systemic cure requires more than enforcement sweeps and registry purges. Federal regulations must establish minimum training requirements, at a minimum 160 hours of combined classroom and behind-the-wheel instruction for Class A CDLs, with specific proficiency standards that cannot be waived. All CDL testing must be conducted by certified state employees with federal oversight, eliminating third-party testing that creates the exact corruption opportunities documented in Washington, Massachusetts, and Illinois. Federal law should establish minimum sentences for CDL fraud that reflect the public safety risk created by putting unqualified drivers behind the wheel of 80,000-pound vehicles. Every state operating without mandatory behind-the-wheel training for basic driver’s licenses needs to understand that the pipeline they’re feeding starts well before any commercial credential gets issued.
The self-certification model that allowed large numbers of bad actors into the Training Provider Registry is being targeted for elimination. FMCSA has committed to initiating rulemaking to end it. Replacing self-attestation with rigorous validation is not optional if the goal is an actual safety standard rather than a paperwork standard.
Every fraudulent CDL represents a potential mass casualty event. The three people who died on the Florida Turnpike didn’t have to die. A licensing system that taught the driver what an illegal U-turn on a highway means and actually verified that he understood it before issuing him a credential might have prevented that crash. Instead, a system that prioritized processing over competency enabled a tragedy that was entirely foreseeable.
America’s highways shouldn’t be training grounds for drivers who earned their CDLs through bribery, fraud, or a five-day mill that called itself a school. Washington is finally showing up to the fight. What remains to be seen is whether the reforms go deep enough to outlast the administration that initiated them, or whether the next political cycle allows the industry to quietly rebuild the same broken infrastructure under a different name.
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