A Trucking Agenda for Trump

The new administration could make roads safer and help drivers support their families, mostly without new legislation.

By Gord Magill, trucker, writer, and commentator

The year 2024 was a particularly difficult one for the trucking industry, as many companies closed up shop or went bankrupt and many thousands of drivers and owner-operators found themselves out of work in what has been referred to as a major ‘freight recession.’ The excess capacity that entered the market during COVID is being shaken out of the industry, but how that capacity was summoned from the ether so quickly is downstream of some major policy problems, some of high import to the motoring public. 

Given the importance of truckers to every other material part of the economy, the concerns of truckers ought to be front and center for the returning Trump administration. Those concerns have been ignored by Democrats and Republicans across many administrations, especially those of Presidents Obama and Biden. 

Certain areas of the trucking industry have become wards of the state, and the costs of these taxpayer-funded programs have been socialized across government and the economy. We also have an extremely expensive bureaucracy that oversees the trucking industry, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), whose budget in 2024 was $951 million. 

The FMCSA ought to explain itself to the taxpayer, as the highway safety it purports to regulate leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps its operations will come under scrutiny from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). There are other regulatory agencies, such as the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency, whose policies have done nothing but make brittle this most critical component of our supply chains and are themselves due for an operational audit. 

Come along with me as I outline all of this and make proposals to the Trump administration that will save taxpayer money, bring resiliency to our supply chains, ensure the flourishing of truckers and the communities where they live, and increase the safety of our roads.

A Flooded Market, Care of the Taxpayer

The “freight recession” of 2024 led to a significant number of company closures, bankruptcies, and job losses. Industry trade publication FreightWaves has an entire section of its website dedicated to these bankruptcies and layoffs. In an article summarizing the brutal year for trucking in 2024, FreightWaves journalist Clarissa Hawes painted a pretty bleak picture of the market for truckers. 

With a market like this, and truckers finding themselves unemployed all across the country, one wonders why one of the nation’s most entrenched and unknown corporate welfare projects continues to extract money from taxpayers. 

This welfare project slips through any scrutiny because it is marketed as a jobs program: Truck Driver Shortage, We Cannot Get Enough Drivers. The subsidies take many forms, from funds doled out by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) to Pell Grants to $47 million in extra funding for commercial driver’s license training from the Biden administration. The trucking industry is awash in taxpayer largesse. 

Unfortunately, much of this training is a revolving door. The corporate lobby group that cries the most about the driver shortage, the American Trucking Association, in one of its own reports admits: “Of the 7.8 million people employed throughout the economy in jobs related to trucking activity, 3.5 million were truck drivers in 2018. There are over 10 million CDL (Commercial Driver’s License) holders in the U.S., but most are not current drivers and not all are truck drivers.” 

The ATA’s numbers track with a survey conducted by a driver advocacy organization called CDL-Drivers Unlimited, which found that there are at least 8.8 million active CDLs in America, and numbers from an organization called the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (which is a mouthful to say ‘collective state DMVs’), which claimed to NPR that America produces 450,000 new CDLs a year.

Where are all of these people going? Even outgoing Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has admitted that, from what the federal government knows, 300,000 people let their CDLs expire every year. Why are we financing a system that produces excess truckers when it is clear that we have three times as many as we need already?

One of the undiscussed effects of this taxpayer-funded churn system is that it creates a legitimate shortage of highly skilled truckers—those who stick with the industry and acquire the skills and experience necessary for specialized trucking, such as moving hazardous materials, oversize loads, livestock, and the like.

The churn problem also debases the wage floor for everyone. Driver pay is around half what it was in 1980, adjusting for inflation. Many new truckers rightly decide to quit the industry rather than work at a very hard job that requires a significant sacrifice in time away from home, as well as safety—truck driving is one of the top ten most dangerous jobs in America. Ironically, one of the reasons the job is so dangerous is because of this very churn problem: the constant flow of new and inexperienced drivers is a major contributor to truck crash statistics.

In the interest of saving the taxpayer money and returning the occupation of truck driver to a respectable blue-collar job that can support a family, the Trump administration ought to terminate every single taxpayer dollar going to these parasitic truck driving schools, which churn through hundreds of thousands of people every year, for which America and the country’s existing truck drivers get very little in return.

Misdirected Regulatory Resources

The FMCSA, nominally tasked with properly regulating the trucking industry, could use some direction in prioritizing its resources. There are a number of problems in trucking right now that are within the purview of FMCSA to solve, but they seem hellbent on harassing the industry with onerous regulation instead. 

There are a number of fraudulent scams being run on the trucking industry. A recent recurring problem is ‘double brokering,’ where one middleman, a ‘load broker,’ arranges a truck through another load broker, either willfully or unknowingly. Under the law, only one broker may be involved in a load arrangement between a shipper and the trucker hauling the load. In a double-brokered situation, not only is an additional hand in the pie, removing value that ought to be going to the trucker who hauled the freight so that he can operate safely and turn a profit, but questions of liability and even more potential fraud arise. In the most egregious cases, we see situations where the trucker who hauled the load doesn’t get paid at all.

Estimates put the losses from double brokering in the tens of millions of dollars. Cumulatively, with other forms of freight fraud and outright theft of loads, this problem is estimated to cost the economy a staggering $500 to $700 million annually, and some fraudulent carriers and brokers are so brazen that they are now holding loads for ransom. 

Many of these scammy load brokers are based overseas. There are cottage industries based in Serbia and other parts of Eastern Europe and “dispatch services” in Colombia, Pakistan, or the Philippines. These offshore “service providers” are scraping away a lot of value from the American trucking industry.

What is the FMCSA doing about this? Not much, as it turns out. The biggest crackdown they have orchestrated, which isn’t even in the world of freight, was on companies that move households. 

The FMCSA, if you go by the news feed on their website, spends an incredible amount of time auditing new entrants to the Electronic Logging Device (ELD) market, despite the fact that truck crashes and aggressive driving have gone up since the ELD mandate came into effect in 2017. The imposition of this piece of surveillance technology into trucks has been a major bone of contention for a lot of truckers, causing a significant percentage to take early retirement and owner operators to keep older, exempt trucks on the road.

The ELD, it was said, would make our roads safer by digitally micromanaging truckers lives. Former head of the FMCSA Robin Hutcheson was asked if the FMCSA would reconsider the mandate after being shown conclusively that it had achieved zero of its goals or objectives. She said no.

In fact, the FMCSA is now considering expanding the ELD mandate to older trucks that have so far been exempted, even though there is zero evidence that trucks exempted from the mandate are a factor in collisions or other safety concerns. The FMCSA is worried about compliance, not material improvement.

The FMCSA is also considering a federal mechanical speed limiter mandate for big trucks, a proposal that is wildly unpopular, to say the least. We all want safe roads and safe drivers, but perhaps the FMCSA ought to be interfacing with other agencies to put an end to a problem that has been around the trucking industry forever: that of unpaid detention. Truckers are held up for an incredible amount of time at shippers and receivers, and there is no mechanism in the law that requires they be paid for that delay time. Incentives are real, and if drivers are caught between customers who abuse their time and a surveillance tech mandate that does not allow them to make up for that lost time, some truckers end up driving fast

There has been a piece of legislation languishing in committee since 2022, the Guaranteeing Overtime for Truckers Act, to address this problem. Perhaps if we didn’t pay truckers as if they were second-class workers, and we had a mechanism to incentivize shippers to tighten up their operations, we would not need a speed limiter mandate. 

President Trump ought to nominate a leader to the FMCSA who isn’t a career bureaucrat, but rather someone with appropriate experience in the trucking industry who understands the economics of the business and the myriad challenges that truckers face. Such a leader could ensure that truckers are not regulated out of existence or made the subjects of a panopticon that treats them as criminals.

The Use and Abuse of Migrants in Trucking

Another problem the FMCSA is doing nothing about, as far as I’m aware, is the very worrying trend of illegal migrants being employed as truckers in America, many of whom have no command of the English language, don’t possess a CDL, or any form of training. Often they are bound to their employers through indentured servitude arrangements. This is, in essence, a form of modern-day slavery. 

On top of this being completely and utterly unethical, illegal aliens and migrants here “legally” through the abuse of existing visa programs are often paid rates far below prevailing wages, undercutting the wage floor for the American trucker and all other workers. 

Though a handful of articles have looked into this problem, it is very difficult to get hard numbers on these trends, in part because of the self-censoring that many organizations engage in, but also because the “woke” cultural climate makes criticism of foreign labor a sensitive subject.

An advocacy organization called American Truckers United has begun to analyze crash data and connect the dots between increasing truck collision numbers and the use of overseas labor. The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, which conducts annual roadside safety inspection ‘blitzes,’ found that in 2024, 2 of the top 5 out-of-service violations (in which enforcement officials take a driver off the road) were failure to produce a CDL and failure to produce a medical certification showing fitness to be on the road. These violations correlate with the behavior of companies that employ illegal migrants. 

In 2016, a memorandum was issued by the FMCSA that waived the requirement for commercial truck drivers to communicate effectively in English, or at least restricted enforcement officials from placing such a driver out of service. 

Why would the Obama administration waive this critical safety legislation? Was he just being nice to immigrants, or was he helping to unnaturally increase the pool of available truckers, which in turn suppresses trucker’s wages and keeps costs down for carriers and their customers?

Some of the problems with employing illegal and other immigrant labor in trucking have been persistent for years. In 2017, USA Today did a three-part series on how migrants from Central America were being abused in drayage operations at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Migrant truckers were found to be paid starvation wages, if they were paid at all. In many cases, they were barred from going home at the end of their shifts, instead being told to “take a nap” and then keep on trucking.

Why is the trucking industry, which is the most critical link in the nation’s supply chains, being allowed to be undermined by foreign actors? 

Though President Trump has already signaled that he plans to deport illegal immigrants, special consideration should be given to truckers, as the characteristics of the job are such that drivers are not in one spot for very long, and it is easy for illegal migrants to fly under the radar.

It is a neat avoidance trick that works—until it doesn’t, as was the case with this gentleman, who was deported back to Mexico 16 times but came back and kept on trucking anyway. He eventually killed someone and sent a number of people to the hospital.

The trucker who killed a Kentucky tow truck driver rendering service to a broken-down motorist on the side of the interstate has disappeared, possibly back to Uzbekistan, where he will never face justice for his crimes. Maybe he was trying to learn English while watching YouTube at the same time he was driving his rig.

This communications problem is not unique to America. Thousands of truckers from Canada and Mexico operate freely on American roads. In Canada, new Indian migrants are put behind the wheel in what amounts to an indentured servitude program, and provincial transport authorities allow recent arrivals to use interpreters while taking their theory tests.

A very easy solution to this would be for President Trump to order the next FMCSA administrator to overturn the Obama-era waiver that prevents enforcement officials from placing non-English speakers out of service. He could also tell Canada that this applies to their truckers as well. America’s highways have enough problems without having to deal with Canada’s insufficiently safety-conscious approach to its own trucking industry. There are more than enough laid-off truckers out there right now who could be brought back into service to pick up any slack.

Fixing the Overtime Problem

There is one more thing the Trump administration could do to help America’s truckers, their families, and the resiliency of our supply chains: encourage Congress to finally pass the Guaranteeing Overtime for Truckers Act (GOT Act).

Truckers are expected to work up to 70 hours a week, but, unlike nearly every other worker in the economy, they have been made second-class citizens by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which exempts truckers from overtime pay. This leads to costly delays for drivers, who then make up for it by driving even faster. 

The linchpin to the problem is that there is no cost placed on a truck driver’s time, as most trucking rates, and thus driver pay, are calculated by mileage. If the GOT Act were passed and drivers’ overtime pay had to be accounted for, it would give leverage to trucking companies to increase detention rates and thus incentivize shippers and receivers to get trucks moving. Given that an MIT researcher who studied the trucking industry found that “forty percent of America’s trucking capacity is left on the table every day,” the economics and efficiency nerds should have fainted by now.

Surely a bill that is only one line and not bundled with tons of pork, as is the way in Washington, could be passed very easily. President Trump ought to demand that this bill end up on his desk immediately.

The trucking industry has always flown under the radar of consciousness in America. As if by magic, grocery stores and gas stations appear to stay stocked. Typically, unless you are paying close attention or are a regular on the interstate, truckers might as well not exist at all as they quietly and humbly go about the work of keeping America moving.

In 2025, the industry finds itself in a bit of a crisis that has been ongoing for quite some time, kept together by band-aids in the form of corporate welfare or insourcing foreign labor. But those two band-aids make a sick industry even worse. President Trump has a unique opportunity to show the industry that the old values of self-reliance and independence can and should return. 

Many of the steps outlined above would require no extra government action, no complicated bills, no meetings of bureaucrats. By simply overturning the 2016 waiver, President Trump would make it much more difficult for unsavory and often unsafe operators in the trucking business to insource their labor from other countries. Ending government funding for truck driver training, based on the fact that we know conclusively there are 3 times as many truckers in America as there are jobs available for them, would also constrict the labor pool so that Americans who are legitimate, skilled, experienced, and safe operators can return to the business without being undercut by their own government.

With these simple measures, the new Trump administration would almost instantly make our roads more safe, give a reason for many of America’s truckers to get back into the business, and substantially increase the efficiency and resiliency of our supply chains.