Indiana's revocation of nearly 2000 non-domiciled CDLs from undocumented drivers grabbed national headlines this week. It should. Four men died in Jay County. A 64-year-old man named Terry Schultz died in Hendricks County. Those deaths matter and the people responsible for them should be held accountable. But if you stop the conversation at immigration enforcement, you are treating a symptom while the disease keeps spreading. The deeper problem is structural and it predates the foreign driver conversation by decades. American trucking has an open-door policy and it has had one since 1980. The consequences of that policy are written in crash reports, fraudulent insurance filings, ghost carrier registrations, and the slow professional death of an industry that once required genuine skill and accountability to enter.
We do not have a driver shortage in this country. We have a shortage of skilled, qualified, honest operators, drivers, and brokers. That is a different problem and it requires a different solution. What we have in abundance is warm bodies holding CDLs they should not have, carriers with authority they have no operational capacity to support, brokers moving freight under a process that requires less documentation than a library card, and an entire compliance infrastructure built on self-attestation, honor systems, and the assumption that everyone filling out a federal form is telling the truth. They are not.
The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 deregulated the industry. Before that, the Interstate Commerce Commission required a certificate of public convenience and necessity before any carrier could access the freight network. The process was slow and imperfect and the incumbent carriers used it to suppress competition. But it was a filter. After 1980, the filter was removed. Today, you can register a motor carrier authority with FMCSA for approximately $300 in filing fees and a BOC-3 process agent filing can be done online for under $40. You fill out the OP-1 application, certify the accuracy of your own information, and wait for the federal government to mail you a number that gives you legal access to every load board, every brokerage tender, and every shipper dock in the country. FMCSA does not verify that you own a truck. It does not verify that you employ a driver. It does not inspect your terminal before your authority activates. It accepts your application on faith.
The broker side is not meaningfully better. A freight broker license requires a $75,000 surety bond or trust fund, which can be financed for as little as $1000 a year, a broker authority application and the same basic BMC filings a carrier uses. The total first-year cost to operate as a licensed freight broker in the United States is under $1,200 in most cases. You do not need to demonstrate industry knowledge. You do not need to pass an examination on carrier vetting, cargo liability, or fraud detection. You do not need to show that you have any understanding of what you are agreeing to when you tender a load to a carrier that just got its authority three weeks ago. You need a bond and a fee and a computer. For that investment, you get access to unlimited freight and the ability to function as the legal intermediary between shippers moving billions of dollars in goods annually and carriers who may or may not be who they claim to be.
The self-attestation problem runs through every layer of the industry. The Entry-Level Driver Training program was built with the right intentions and launched in February 2022 to ensure that new CDL applicants receive structured training from registered providers before testing. The training provider registry is a self-certification system. A school submits its information to FMCSA, certifies that it meets the requirements and gets listed. FMCSA does not conduct site visits before listing. It does not verify instructor qualifications before listing. It does not confirm that the curriculum meets the standard before listing. The system relies on the provider telling the truth. Some of them do not and the fraud in CDL training programs is documented, prosecuted and ongoing. ELDT was not a solution in its final regulatory form. It was a great idea that, after being gutted, became a reg requiring self-attested registration and use of a curriculum you could've made in PowerPoint on your own.
Electronic logging device registration works the same way. Until recently, any company could submit a self-certification to FMCSA declaring that its ELD device meets the technical standards and get placed on the registered device list. No independent hardware testing. No third-party software audit. No verification that the device actually functions as certified. FMCSA removed 14 devices from the registered list in a recent enforcement action. Fourteen. There are hundreds of devices on that list and the agency that administers the mandate has no practical mechanism to verify that most of them do what their manufacturers claim. Carriers are required to use a registered ELD. They are not protected from using a registered ELD that was registered fraudulently, manipulates hours-of-service data, or fails in the field. Responsibility for the consequences of a fraudulent device lies with the driver and the carrier, while the ELD provider who submitted a false self-certification faces limited accountability.
Medical certification operates on the same honor system. Commercial drivers are required to obtain a DOT physical from a Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration-registered medical examiner and maintain a current medical certificate as a condition of their CDL. The medical examiner registry was a genuine improvement when it launched because it created accountability and audit capability that the prior system lacked. But the registry is not immune to fraud. We have documented cases of medical examiners issuing certificates to drivers who do not meet the physical qualification standards, accepting payment for certifications without conducting actual examinations, and operating effectively as CDL certification mills in medical clothing. When a driver with a disqualifying condition is on the road because a corrupt examiner signed a form, the liability chain eventually reaches the carrier, the shipper, and the plaintiff bar. The examiner is the link that was supposed to hold.
Then there is the automatic transmission. This one gets dismissed as nostalgia and it is not. The shift from manual to automated transmissions in Class 8 trucks happened quickly, starting around 2014 and reaching over 90 percent of new builds by the early 2020s. The efficiency argument was real. Automated transmissions optimize shift points, reduce fuel consumption at scale, and lower training completion times. Large carriers ran the math and moved fast. What the industry traded away in that transition was mechanical literacy as a professional filter. Driving a manual transmission truck required you to understand the relationship between engine speed, road speed, gear selection, rear axle ratios and grade. It required feel and timing. It was a skill that took time to develop and the development of that skill built a baseline mechanical understanding that made drivers better at recognizing problems before those problems became catastrophes on the highway. An automatic transmission removes that requirement. You can now graduate a driver in weeks who has no meaningful understanding of what is happening mechanically under the hood or in the drivetrain. That driver holds the same CDL as a driver who spent months learning the equipment. The credential does not distinguish between them.
The shortage narrative enabled all of this. Carrier associations, major fleets and their lobbyists spent years arguing before Congress and FMCSA that the industry faced a catastrophic driver shortage and that regulatory barriers needed to come down to address it. The DRIVE Safe Act proposed lowering the interstate commercial driving age to 18. Programs expanded to funnel refugee and immigrant labor into the driving workforce. ELDT minimum training hour requirements were opposed at every legislative opportunity. The shortage narrative was the political instrument used to justify every reduction in entry standards across the board. The problem is that the shortage was not what it was described to be. What the industry had was a shortage of drivers willing to work for the wages being offered under the conditions being imposed with the equipment being provided. That is a compensation and working conditions problem, not a labor supply problem. The policy response to a false shortage diagnosis was to flood the market with cheaper, less qualified labor and call it a solution.
The IDEMIA identity verification partnership announced by the FMCSA is a real step in the right direction and deserves credit. Identity fraud is foundational to most of the other fraud in this industry. If you cannot verify that the person applying for authority, registering an ELD, enrolling in ELDT or obtaining a CDL is who they claim to be, every other compliance requirement downstream is built on sand. IDEMIA addresses that foundation. It addresses it at the front door of new applications. The existing carrier population, the existing CDL holder population, the existing training provider registry and the existing ELD device list all carry whatever fraud was baked into them before enhanced identity verification existed. Closing the front door is not the same as cleaning the house.
Indiana's law is a meaningful enforcement action in a state that has documented carrier cluster fraud in residential neighborhoods, documented fatal crashes involving drivers who obtained CDLs through a broken system and documented enforcement operations that pulled 146 truck drivers off a single stretch of highway in a single operation. It is also one state that closed one door while the federal reciprocity framework leaves adjacent doors open. The structural problem is national. The carrier registration process, broker licensing standards, ELDT provider oversight, ELD device certification, medical examiner accountability, CDL training requirements and the professional standards of the industry as a whole have all been eroded over 45 years of policy decisions that prioritized access over accountability and supply over standards.
We do not have a driver shortage. We have a standards shortage. We have an accountability shortage. We have an enforcement shortage. And we have been told for 45 years that the answer to every problem this industry produces is to lower the bar further and let more people through the door. The results are on the side of the road in Jay County, Indiana and in Hendricks County and in every state where a carrier registered from a residential address is dispatching a driver with a CDL they obtained from a school that should have been shut down years ago.
The door has been open too long. It is time to talk seriously about what it would take to close it.
