Secretary Duffy prioritizes barriers to entry in trucking

The federal government is playing catch-up on a crisis this industry has been screaming about for years. The question isn’t whether the crackdown is welcome. The question is whether it goes deep enough to actually fix the broken licensing infrastructure that made all of this possible in the first place.

America’s highways have become a testing ground for unqualified drivers operating 80,000-pound weapons, and the blame falls squarely on a commercial driver licensing system so broken that it has become an open door rather than a professional barrier.

From fraudulent training schools running fast-track and eight-hour ELDT programs to law enforcement officers taking bribes to pass failing students, the infrastructure designed to ensure only qualified drivers earn CDLs collapsed into a profit-driven assembly line that prioritized processing over public safety.

I had a few minutes with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy at the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville last week, and what he said about CDL training was blunt. The shady schools have to go. Training matters. Washington is no longer looking the other way.

That conversation happened against the backdrop of the most aggressive federal crackdown on CDL mills in the program’s history, and after months of watching real-world consequences pile up on the nation’s highways, the urgency in that room felt earned.

The September 2024 Florida Turnpike crash that killed three people is the kind of event that resets how you look at all of this. The truck driver, in the U. S. since 2018 with a California CDL, made an illegal U-turn on the highway, creating an unavoidable obstacle that led to a fatal underride collision.

A minivan hit the side of the rig and went under the trailer. Three people died. This wasn’t an isolated incident. It was the predictable result of licensing standards so compromised that they had lost all meaning as a safety barrier.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Entry-Level Driver Training regulations, implemented February 7, 2022, promised to establish national standards for commercial driver education.

Instead, regulators issued a curriculum framework with no minimum training hours, creating a system in which training providers could theoretically complete ELDT requirements in a matter of hours while claiming federal compliance. There are no specific hours of training required for ELDT.

Drivers must receive training in 30-plus theory topics and receive hands-on driving skills training until the driver is “proficient,” as determined by the training provider. That regulatory void allowed training providers to define proficiency however they chose, with predictable results.

The American Trucking Associations’ messaging that there are no minimum training hours required and that no new exorbitant costs are associated with ELDT revealed the industry’s true priorities: removing barriers rather than ensuring competence. ELDT became a paperwork exercise that provided legal cover while producing inadequately trained drivers.

Federal investigations have laid bare how deeply the commercial driver training industry was hollowed out by criminal operators. The Skyline CDL School scandal provided the blueprint. Skyline, operating in Washington and Oregon, paid cash bribes to an independent CDL examiner named Jason Hodson.

Gold envelopes stuffed with cash, each marked with a student’s date of birth, were couriered from Skyline directly to Hodson. In many cases, students didn’t even show up for their tests, yet they were recorded as having passed. Between April 2023 and September 2024, Hodson recorded 877 exams, 822 of which came from Skyline.

When those students were retested, 80% failed. When Washington shut Skyline down, it simply continued operating in Oregon. That’s what regulatory arbitrage looks like in practice. The fraud extended well beyond individual schools.

In Massachusetts, two current and two former state police troopers were charged in connection with a conspiracy to give passing scores to CDL applicants, including individuals who failed or never took the skills test, in exchange for bribes that included free spring water, a new driveway and a snowblower.

The scheme used code words like “golden handshake” to identify applicants who would receive automatic passing scores. One trooper described an applicant as “brain dead” and “horrible” before passing him in exchange for a household appliance.

In a separate case, Tsymbalenko pleaded guilty in October 2023 to bribery involving programs receiving federal funds and to witness tampering after bribing a CDL examiner to pass students who had failed or didn’t take their tests.

The original CDL mill scandal, the one that set the template for all the others, was in Illinois in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Former Governor George Ryan, who had previously served as Illinois Secretary of State, was indicted after a five-year investigation revealed that CDLs were sold under his watch, with t