U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy used the one-year anniversary of President Trump's executive order on trucking reform to lay out a string of enforcement numbers that would have been unthinkable under the previous administration: more than 20,000 non-English-proficient truck drivers pulled from service, over 28,000 illegally issued commercial driver's licenses revoked nationwide, and more than 6,800 unqualified training providers stripped from the federal registry.
The Department of Transportation released the tally in a Friday statement, framing the past twelve months as a top-to-bottom overhaul of an industry that Duffy himself described as having been "allowed to operate like the Wild, Wild West for far too long." The numbers tell a story of a federal agency that stopped looking the other way, and started withholding hundreds of millions of dollars from states that refused to comply.
For American truckers who watched their livelihoods erode as unlicensed and undertrained drivers flooded the roads, the crackdown is overdue. For the families of those killed in preventable crashes involving non-domiciled drivers, it arrived too late.
The enforcement push began in earnest in May 2025, when Duffy issued new guidance reinstating English Language Proficiency standards for commercial drivers. That guidance rescinded an Obama-era policy that had relaxed the rules around enforcing English proficiency, a policy that, in practice, allowed drivers who could not read American road signs to operate 80,000-pound vehicles on public highways.
By June 2025, English proficiency requirements were officially reincorporated into the federal framework. Since that month, more than 20,000 truckers have been kicked out of service for failing to meet basic requirements, the DOT stated.
When California refused to enforce the new standards, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration did not send a sternly worded letter and move on. It withheld $40 million in federal funds in October 2025. California began enforcing ELP in January 2026. The sequence is worth noting: the state acted only after the money stopped flowing.
That pattern repeated on the licensing front. FMCSA launched a nationwide audit in June 2025 targeting states that had been illegally issuing non-domiciled CDLs, licenses granted to foreign nationals without proper vetting of their legal status or qualifications. The agency identified more than 30 states issuing non-compliant licenses and sent official enforcement actions to 26 of them.
California drew the heaviest hit. In January 2026, FMCSA withheld $160 million from the state for failing to revoke illegally issued non-domiciled CDLs. AP News reported that California ultimately revoked 21,000 commercial driver's licenses after federal scrutiny over immigration-status verification problems, a figure that underscores the scale of the licensing failures that had been allowed to accumulate.
New York was next. In April 2026, FMCSA withheld $73 million from the state for the same reason. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrator Derek D. stated that "New York must act immediately to comprehensively audit its CDL program and revoke every single illegally issued license."
The Transportation Department found licensing problems in at least eight states total: California, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, New York, Texas, South Dakota, Colorado, and Washington. The federal government's willingness to use financial leverage against noncompliant states, including deep-blue strongholds, marks a sharp departure from the hands-off approach of prior administrations. It also fits a broader pattern of Trump-era enforcement actions that tie federal dollars to compliance with the law.
Duffy made the legal basis explicit in a letter to states, noting that recipients of DOT funds "have entered into legally enforceable agreements with the United States Government and are obligated to comply fully with all applicable Federal laws and regulations," including "those prohibiting discrimination and enforcing controls on illegal immigration."
Behind the statistics are real collisions, real deaths, and real families left shattered. The DOT cited several examples that illustrate what happens when unqualified drivers operate commercial vehicles on American roads.
On February 14, 2025, a non-domiciled driver triggered a multi-vehicle crash inside a tunnel on I-80 in Wyoming. Three people died. Twenty were injured. On August 12, 2025, a non-domiciled driver attempted an illegal U-turn on the Florida Turnpike and killed three people. On October 21, a non-domiciled driver failed to stop for traffic on a California highway, causing a collision involving eight vehicles that killed three more. And on December 3, 2025, a non-domiciled driver collided with a train at a marked crossing in Ontario, California, killing a crew member.
These are not abstract policy failures. They are preventable deaths caused by drivers who should never have been behind the wheel of a commercial truck, and who, in many cases, held licenses issued by state agencies that were not checking the basics.
The connection between licensing fraud and fatal crashes also drew attention from Congress. The New York Post reported that Sen. Tom Cotton and Rep. Andy Barr urged Duffy to investigate so-called "CDL mills", substandard training programs that prioritize volume over safety. The lawmakers introduced the Secure Commercial Driver Licensing Act of 2025 to block illegal immigrants from obtaining CDLs and require CDL testing to be conducted in English.
Cotton and Barr described CDL mills as programs that "offer quick credentials" while "prioritizing volume over proper safety and training requirements." Their push followed fatal crashes involving drivers identified as illegal immigrants operating semi-trucks.
The administration did not limit its enforcement to state licensing agencies. In December 2025, FMCSA mobilized more than 300 investigators across all 50 states to audit approximately 1,500 training providers. The result: more than 6,800 unqualified training providers were removed from the FMCSA registry over the past year.
Targeted enforcement actions went further still. The Washington Examiner reported that Duffy shut down AJ Partners, the employer of a Kyrgyz national named Bekzhan Beishekeev, who was described as being in the country illegally and was involved in a February 3 crash in Indiana that killed four Amish van passengers. DOT also shut down two connected carriers, Tutash Express and Sam Express, and revoked the certification of Aydana, the school that certified the driver.
The Pennsylvania licensing pipeline also drew federal attention. ICE arrested 13 illegal immigrants after receiving tips about truck drivers at a Pennsylvania licensing center, a case that illustrated how immigration enforcement and transportation safety overlap when the system breaks down.
Duffy's posture toward noncompliant states has been blunt. Fox News reported him saying, "We are going to maximize everyone's safety on American roadways, and that means going after states, pulling money from states. We 100% under Donald Trump's leadership will." He added: "What we've done at DOT is say, 'Listen, unless you comply with our rules, we are going to take money away from your state.'"
The crackdown on fraud and noncompliance came alongside a deregulatory push aimed at making life easier for the Americans who drive legally and follow the rules. FMCSA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration withdrew a joint rulemaking that had proposed speed limiters on heavy vehicles, a move the industry had long opposed. The agency also affirmed the Electronic Logging Device exemption for pre-2000 model year trucks.
Two new pilot programs, "Flexible Sleeper Berth" and "Split Duty Periods", were introduced to give drivers more options for rest scheduling. FMCSA invested more than $300 million in truck parking grants since April 2025, addressing a chronic shortage that forces drivers to park in unsafe locations. The agency also proposed eliminating over 1,800 words of federal regulations, which it estimated would save the industry millions annually.
In March 2026, Duffy joined more than 53,000 truckers from all 50 states at the Mid-America Trucking Show in Kentucky. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrator Barrs struck a personal note in his remarks, saying he had "spent my life looking out for the folks on our highways" and calling truckers "the heartbeat of this country." The broader pattern of federal enforcement paired with regulatory relief for lawful operators reflects the same approach the administration has taken in other crackdown efforts, punish the cheaters, lighten the load on those who play by the rules.
Shannon Everett of American Truckers United painted a grim picture of what years of lax enforcement did to the profession. Everett told Breitbart News in November:
"The American trucking industry is now 3.5 years into the longest and deepest downturn in its history, a downturn that was not caused by normal economic cycles, but by the mass dumping and rapid licensing of hundreds of thousands of recently arrived migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers into commercial trucking. This unprecedented labor dumping has flooded the driver pool, allowing brokers and power only fleets to slash rates to levels that no experienced American driver can survive on."
Everett described the result as devastating: "tens of thousands of U.S.-citizen owner-operators and small fleet owners have been driven into bankruptcy, forced to park their trucks, or pushed entirely out of the profession they spent decades building." Everett called it "an attempted replacement of American truck drivers on a scale never seen before in this industry."
Those are strong words. But the numbers back them up. When an administration can revoke 28,000 illegally issued licenses and pull 20,000 drivers off the road in a single year, the prior scale of noncompliance was not a minor oversight. It was systemic. And the states that enabled it, by issuing licenses without proper vetting, by ignoring English proficiency requirements, by allowing CDL mills to flourish, bear direct responsibility for every crash those drivers caused.
The administration has signaled it is not finished. Duffy said plainly that "we're just getting started." FMCSA recently issued guidance addressing pressure on drivers to violate federal safety regulations, upgraded its complaint system to a mobile-friendly platform with faster response times, and rolled out new categories for reporting noncompliant brokers and training providers. In April 2026, the agency launched an upgraded DataQs process as well. The administration's broader legal and policy wins have given agencies like DOT the political cover to enforce rules that existed on paper for years but were treated as optional.
For a decade, the trucking industry's safety problems were an open secret. What changed was not the rules, it was the willingness to enforce them. That alone tells you everything about what went wrong.
