The White House launched a new program to steer military veterans into high-paying commercial trucking careers, filling seats left empty by a federal crackdown that has already pulled tens of thousands of illegal immigrant drivers off American roads.
President Trump announced the "Freedom Haulers" initiative at a White House event, flanked by veterans, trucking industry leaders, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. The program offers qualifying veterans a streamlined path to a commercial driver's license by waiving the CDL road-skills test for those who drove heavy military vehicles and waiving the written knowledge test in 34 participating states. Veterans without military driving experience can complete expedited training in a matter of weeks, with the GI Bill covering the full cost.
The announcement lands against a concrete backdrop: federal regulators have canceled roughly 30,000 commercial licenses that were issued illegally to non-citizens and pulled another 26,000 drivers off the road for failing English proficiency requirements, AP News reported. Combined, that amounts to approximately 56,000 immigrant drivers removed from the nation's highways, a gap the administration now wants veterans to fill.
Tom Jacques watched the announcement from inside the White House. An Army veteran who enlisted and joined the 3rd U.S. Infantry as a presidential escort, Jacques now serves as Director of DOT Compliance at Waste Management and chairs the board of the Pennsylvania Motor Trucking Association. He told Fox News Digital that the initiative taps into a workforce the industry desperately needs.
"It's wonderful to get skilled workers who are disciplined [and] dedicated into an industry that requires discipline and dedication. You don't get behind the wheel of a tractor-trailer, 80,000 pounds, without understanding the need to be disciplined and to be safe."
Jacques framed the trucking industry as the invisible backbone of the American economy. Commodities move because trucks move, he said, and the workforce driving them is aging fast.
"There's no shortage of positions for truck drivers. It's an aging workforce. It's something that people need to understand that we've got to be continually replenishing that workforce, and [it's] a great opportunity getting our veterans... into a good, [highly-paying job] right out of the service."
He pointed to the COVID-19 period as proof of truckers' essential role, drivers kept working while non-essential workers were furloughed. The country noticed then. Jacques wants it to keep noticing.
Trump used the event to draw a sharp line between two visions of the trucking workforce. He said state officials had issued commercial driver's licenses to illegal immigrants who were not entitled to hold them, putting unqualified drivers behind the wheels of 80,000-pound rigs.
"For many years, American highways and roadways have been terrorized by unqualified [illegal aliens] dangerously driving big rigs. You have to have a talent for it, and these people don't have that."
The scale of the problem is not abstract. The Department of Transportation has documented at least 30 deaths from 17 fatal crashes caused by illegal immigrant commercial vehicle drivers in 2025, the New York Post reported. California alone saw nearly 13,000 licenses removed, and New York faces action against 33,000 more. Both states now confront federal funding penalties for having issued those licenses in the first place.
Trump told the audience that 24,000 illegal immigrant drivers had already been taken off the roads. The broader crackdown, combining revoked illegal licenses and English proficiency enforcement, has reached roughly 56,000 drivers, according to Newsmax.
That creates a real workforce gap. Immigrants account for about 20 percent of all truck drivers nationally, and non-domiciled commercial licenses, the category most affected by the crackdown, represent roughly 200,000 of the nation's CDL holders. Removing the unqualified ones is the right call on safety grounds, but it leaves routes uncovered and freight delayed unless replacements arrive quickly.
Trump cited data showing that veteran truck drivers account for 42 percent fewer accidents than their non-veteran counterparts, even as they log double the miles. He called that figure a minimum estimate. The administration did not name the specific data source during the event, but the statistic formed the policy rationale for prioritizing veterans over a generic recruitment campaign.
Duffy laid out the economics. Trucking jobs pay between $80,000 and $100,000 or more per year, he said, with medical benefits and flexible schedules. Before Freedom Haulers, a veteran who had spent years driving heavy vehicles in combat zones still had to grind through months of civilian CDL training, a redundancy that discouraged many from entering the field.
Duffy framed the fix in blunt terms at the event:
"These are great paying jobs. They're anywhere from $80 to $100,000 plus a year. And it's important because you have men and women who drove big rigs in the military who would then get out and have to go through a months-long training for their skills and their knowledge test to drive this vehicle over here."
The program is not starting from scratch. More than 40,000 veterans have already used the existing military CDL skills-test waiver, which applies to those who recently drove military vehicles weighing more than 2.5 tons. Freedom Haulers expands the eligibility window from 12 months after separation to 24 months, widening the pipeline considerably. The GI Bill now covers 100 percent of CDL training costs and can include a housing stipend for veterans in the program.
Freedom Haulers is not a Transportation Department solo act. The initiative involves an interagency effort spanning the Departments of Transportation, Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Labor, a coordination structure designed to reach service members before they even leave the military and connect them to carriers on the other side.
Cole Stevens, Chief Strategy Officer at Stevens Transport, endorsed the approach. "Some of the best drivers and industry leaders I've had the privilege of working with are military veterans," Stevens said, as reported by the Washington Examiner. "Their integrity, accountability, and mission-first mindset make them an incredible asset."
Duffy put the safety contrast in direct terms: "We are removing more and more dangerous foreign drivers off our roads every day and restoring the integrity of America's trucking industry."
Trump summed up the policy choice as a binary. "The radical left wants more jobs for illegal aliens and more migrants in 18-wheelers," he said. "And the Trump administration wants safer roads and more jobs for the American veteran."
Several details remain unresolved. The administration has not publicly identified which 34 states are participating in the written-test waiver. The specific criteria defining a "qualified veteran" eligible for the road-skills test waiver have not been spelled out in detail beyond the 2.5-ton vehicle weight threshold. And it is unclear whether the full initiative rests on executive authority alone or will require congressional action to sustain.
The trucking industry's structural challenge is real regardless of policy. An aging driver workforce, high turnover, and grueling schedules have created a chronic shortage that predates the current crackdown. Freedom Haulers addresses one piece, recruitment, but does not resolve the retention problem that has plagued carriers for decades.
Still, the logic is hard to argue with on its face: take drivers who proved they can handle heavy vehicles under pressure, cut the bureaucratic redundancy that kept them out of civilian cabs, and put them in jobs that pay six figures. Meanwhile, remove the drivers who never should have been licensed in the first place.
That is not a complicated formula. It is the kind of common-sense policy that only looks radical when measured against years of doing the opposite.
