U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy marked the first anniversary of President Trump's trucking executive order with a blunt accounting of the federal crackdown: more than 20,000 non-English-proficient 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 numbers, released in a DOT statement on Friday, amount to one of the most aggressive enforcement campaigns the agency has mounted in years, and Duffy says the administration is "just getting started."
The sweep touches every corner of the commercial trucking system. States that dragged their feet on compliance lost hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. Fraudulent CDL mills were shuttered by the hundreds. And a licensing loophole that let foreign nationals with questionable credentials climb behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound rig was formally closed, as Breitbart News detailed in its reporting on the anniversary.
The crackdown traces back to a single policy reversal. In May 2025, Duffy rescinded an Obama-era directive from 2016 that had relaxed enforcement of English Language Proficiency standards for commercial motor vehicle drivers. Under that prior policy, inspectors had been told not to suspend drivers for English proficiency violations during safety investigations, and citation standards during inspections were reduced.
The Trump administration viewed that as reckless. Federal law requires that any driver operating a commercial vehicle on American roads be able to read and speak enough English to understand highway signs, respond to officials, and make entries on reports. Newsmax reported that Duffy framed the restoration as common sense, saying: "Federal law is clear, a driver who cannot sufficiently read or speak English, our national language, and understand road signs is unqualified to drive a commercial motor vehicle in America."
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt backed the move, calling it "a very common sense policy in the United States of America."
By June 2025, English Language Proficiency requirements were officially reincorporated into federal enforcement. The results came fast. Since that month, more than 20,000 truckers have been placed out of service for failing to meet the basic standard. Some non-compliant drivers didn't wait for enforcement to catch up, they began selling their rigs and removing themselves from roadways almost immediately after the directive took effect.
The enforcement push was not abstract. DOT officials pointed to a grim series of crashes involving drivers who held non-domiciled commercial licenses, permits issued to individuals who do not reside in the state granting the credential.
On February 14, 2025, a non-domiciled driver triggered a multi-vehicle crash inside a tunnel on I-80 in Wyoming, killing three people and injuring 20. On August 12, 2025, another non-domiciled driver attempted an illegal U-turn on the Florida Turnpike, causing a wreck that killed three. On October 21, 2025, a non-domiciled driver failed to stop for traffic on a California highway, setting off an eight-vehicle pileup 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.
The pattern was hard to ignore. Fox News reported that DOT cited at least 30 deaths in 17 crashes during 2025 alone involving non-domiciled drivers, numbers the agency used to justify the crackdown. The new rule finalized in February 2026 stops states from relying on Employment Authorization Documents alone and requires verification of applicants' lawful status and driving history.
Duffy was direct about the stakes. In a statement, he said the administration had "brought back common-sense rules of the road, including requiring English language proficiency and valid working documents for foreign drivers." He added:
"When state leaders failed to keep Americans on the road safe, we stepped in and held them accountable, and we're just getting started."
The DOT didn't just issue warnings. It withheld federal dollars. In June 2025, FMCSA launched a nationwide audit of non-domiciled CDL issuance and found more than 30 states issuing non-compliant licenses. Official enforcement actions went out to 26 of them.
California drew the heaviest penalties. In October 2025, FMCSA withheld $40 million from the state for refusing to enforce English Language Proficiency standards. California relented and began enforcing ELP in January 2026, but the financial pain didn't stop there. That same month, FMCSA withheld an additional $160 million from California for failing to revoke illegally issued non-domiciled CDLs.
New York was next. In April 2026, FMCSA withheld $73 million from the state on the same grounds. The Trump administration's willingness to scrap prior federal approaches and impose direct accountability extended well beyond transportation, but few agencies moved as aggressively as Duffy's DOT.
Just over a year ago, Duffy had put states on formal notice. In a letter to recipients of DOT funds, he spelled out the legal framework in unmistakable terms:
"As recipients of such DOT funds, you have entered into legally enforceable agreements with the United States Government and are obligated to comply fully with all applicable Federal laws and regulations. These laws and regulations include the United States Constitution, Federal statutes, applicable rules, and public policy requirements, including, among others, those protecting free speech and religious liberty and those prohibiting discrimination and enforcing controls on illegal immigration."
That letter was not a suggestion. The funding withholdings that followed made the point plain.
The rot wasn't only at the state licensing level. In December 2025, FMCSA mobilized more than 300 investigators across all 50 states to audit roughly 1,500 training providers. The result: more than 6,800 unqualified training providers were removed from the FMCSA registry over the past year.
That number is staggering. It suggests a training ecosystem that had been allowed to balloon with little meaningful oversight, a system where operators could set up shop, churn out credentials, and feed drivers into a market regardless of whether those drivers were actually qualified to operate heavy commercial vehicles on American highways.
The administration's approach to removing unqualified individuals from positions of responsibility across the federal landscape has been a recurring theme. In trucking, the consequences of lax standards are measured not in bureaucratic inefficiency but in highway fatalities.
American truckers themselves have been among the loudest voices demanding reform. Shannon Everett of American Truckers United told Breitbart in November that the industry's historic downturn was not a natural economic cycle but the direct result of policy failure:
"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 consequences in stark terms: "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." She called the pattern "an attempted replacement of American truck drivers on a scale never seen before in this industry."
That claim, that mass licensing of foreign nationals undercut American drivers, is contested in some quarters. But the enforcement data released by DOT gives the complaint a factual backbone. When more than 28,000 licenses turn out to have been illegally issued and more than 6,800 training providers fail to meet basic standards, it is difficult to argue the system was working as intended.
The broader pattern of the Trump administration using executive authority to enforce existing law where prior administrations chose not to has drawn both praise and legal challenges. In trucking, the political resistance came primarily from blue states that stood to lose federal money.
The anniversary statement wasn't only about enforcement. DOT also highlighted a series of deregulatory and pro-driver moves. FMCSA and NHTSA withdrew a joint rulemaking that had proposed speed limiters on heavy vehicles, a mandate the industry had opposed for years. The agency affirmed the Electronic Logging Device exemption for pre-2000 model year trucks, introduced two pilot programs offering more flexible scheduling for drivers, and invested more than $300 million in truck parking grants since April 2025.
FMCSA also issued official guidance prohibiting carriers from pressuring drivers to violate federal safety regulations, upgraded its DataQs complaint process in April 2026, overhauled its complaint system, and launched a refreshed, mobile-friendly driver resources webpage. The agency is proposing to eliminate over 1,800 words of federal regulations in a broader deregulatory push.
In March 2026, Secretary Duffy joined the Mid-America Trucking Show in Kentucky, which drew more than 53,000 truckers from all 50 states. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administrator Derek D. Barrs, who attended alongside Duffy, framed the administration's work in personal terms:
"I've spent my life looking out for the folks on our highways, and I'm telling you, these drivers are the heartbeat of this country. This administration is finally giving our truckers the support they've earned to get the job done and get home safe to their families."
The broader pattern of federal personnel and policy changes under the Trump administration has reshaped agency after agency. At DOT, the reshaping has been unusually concrete: specific licenses revoked, specific dollars withheld, specific schools shut down.
Open questions remain. The full list of 26 states that received enforcement actions has not been publicly identified. The exact criteria used to remove more than 6,800 training providers from the registry have not been detailed. And the long-term economic effects of the crackdown on freight capacity and rates are still playing out.
But the first-year numbers are hard to argue with on safety grounds. Twenty thousand drivers who couldn't read road signs are no longer behind the wheel. Twenty-eight thousand licenses that should never have been issued have been pulled. Thousands of training operations that couldn't meet basic federal standards are gone.
For years, American truckers watched a system that was supposed to protect them get hollowed out by lax enforcement, political indifference, and an immigration pipeline that treated commercial driving credentials as just another document to hand out. The Trump DOT, whatever its critics say, picked a fight with that system, and brought receipts.