Will the BUILD America 250 Act be the next capacity squeeze

On May 17, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Sam Graves, R-Mo. , and ranking member Rick Larsen, D-Wash. , released the BUILD America 250 Act, a bipartisan five-year surface transportation reauthorization that has to clear Congress before the current law expires Sept. 30.

It is a big bill, more than 1,000 pages, and the press release sells the big numbers. More than $50 billion for bridges, the largest bridge investment in the nation’s history. A first-ever federal framework for autonomous trucks.

A new annual registration fee on electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, pitched as the first new money for the Highway Trust Fund in more than three decades. Those are the headlines. If you broker freight, run a fleet, or write insurance for either one, the provisions that are going to change how you operate are not in the headlines.

They are in Title V, the motor carrier title, and three of them deserve your attention right now. Broker qualifications. DataQs reform. And hair testing. None of the three flips a switch the day the bill is signed. All three change the ground you are standing on.

DataQs reform and your insurance renewal Start with DataQs because it has the most immediate dollars attached to it. Section 5203 does two things that matter.

First, during any period that a safety violation is being contested, the bill requires that violation to be labeled as contested in the Motor Carrier Management Information System and in the other databases that feed off it, including the Pre-Employment Screening Program, the Safety Measurement System and Analysis and Information Online, until the review is finished.

Second, it requires that an appeal of a DataQs decision be decided by a person other than the person who issued the violation. If you have ever fought a roadside inspection violation or a non-preventable crash, you know why both of those matter. Right now, when you challenge something, the clock keeps running against you while you wait.

The violation appears in your SMS percentiles and crash record, visible to anyone who pulls your profile, with no indication that you are disputing it. And the challenge is often reviewed by the same state agency, sometimes the same office, that wrote it up in the first place. The bill does not promise you will win.

It promises the dispute is visible and the review is neutral. That is an insurance story and not just a compliance story. Your crash record and your CSA scores are not abstractions. They are line items in how an underwriter prices your policy and decides whether to renew you at all.

A carrier with a crash on its record that it never bothered to challenge is a carrier paying a higher premium for a crash that may not have been its fault.

If you are not already reviewing every crash and every violation on your record and fighting the ones you can, you are leaving money on the table at renewal, and in this market, nobody can afford to do that.

What this provision should do is make that fight cleaner and more worth your time, because a contested item will finally look contested when your broker or insurer pulls the file. The catch, and there is always a catch, is that the Secretary has a year after enactment to write the participation guidelines, and a year is a year.

Broker qualifications and the liability gap The second provision is broker qualifications, and this one is going to force a conversation the industry has been avoiding. Section 5006 orders the U. S.

Department of Transportation to issue a final rule within 2 years that actually implements the experience and qualification requirements for officers of brokers and freight forwarders. Those requirements have technically been sitting in the statute, in sections 13903 and 13904 of title 49, and they have never been turned into an enforced rule.

The bill also requires DOT to brief Congress every six months until the rule is completed, which is Congress’s way of saying it is tired of waiting. To understand why this matters, consider what it takes to become a broker today versus a motor carrier.

A motor carrier hauling general freight has to carry at least $750,000 in liability coverage, and more for certain commodities. A broker has to post a $75,000 surety bond and clear a registration process with very little real vetting. There is no enforced experience requirement and no minimum liability insurance requirement worth the name.

For years, that was defensible because the legal theory was that a broker arranges freight and does not touch the truck, so the broker does not carry the truck’s exposure. That theory is eroding in real time.

Courts around the country are increasingly letting negligent selection claims against brokers go to juries, and a broker that loses one of those can be tagged with a verdict the size of anything a motor carrier would face. So the industry is walking into an asymmetry.

A broker can now be held nearly as liable as a carrier while carrying none of the carrier’s ba