FMCSA says: Less paper, more enforcement

On June 22, FMCSA published three final rules, all of which are effective July 22. None of them touches the safety elements of hours of service. None of them changes drug and alcohol testing. None of them moves the CDL qualification bar. What they do is clear out paperwork that the agency has decided no longer provides any safety benefit.

The first kills the requirement that CDL holders self-report certain convictions to their home state. That rule made sense when it was written, because disqualification depends on the licensing state knowing about out-of-state tickets.

It does not make as much sense now that states already swap that conviction data electronically through an electronic exchange that went live in 2024. The driver was reporting something the system had already reported. The second rule drops the requirement to keep a copy of the ELD operator’s manual in the cab.

ELDs have been mandatory since December 2019; the manuals are generally stored on the devices and on FMCSA’s own registered-device list, and a printed copy in the glovebox did nothing at the roadside. The third rule says a carrier only has to sign and mail a completed roadside inspection report to the issuing state if that state actually wants it.

Plenty of states never asked for the form in the first place. I have no problem with any of the three. They are friction. Cutting them makes total sense. These are the back end of a deregulatory machine that USDOT spun up the day the Trump Administration began. Executive Order 14192, “Unleashing Prosperity Through Deregulation,” signed Jan.

31, 2025, set the now-familiar 10-to-1 rule and defined a deregulatory action as one with total costs below zero. Executive Order 14219 layered the DOGE deregulatory directive on top of it. DOT reestablished its Regulatory Reform Task Force and started feeding the hopper.

The headline day was May 29, 2025, when Secretary Sean Duffy rolled out 52 deregulatory actions across FHWA, NHTSA, and FMCSA at once, claiming the package stripped more than 73,000 words out of the Code of Federal Regulations. FMCSA’s share was 18 rulemaking actions.

February’s batch finalized a dozen of those 18, and the three rules published June 22 push the running total to 15. The February rules were the same flavor as June’s. FMCSA made explicit that Driver Vehicle Inspection Reports can be done electronically, something the industry already assumed, but the text muddied.

It pulled the requirement to carry liquid-burning flares, which almost nobody uses anyway. It carved out an exception for license-plate lamps on a tractor towing a trailer. It deleted obsolete references to “water carriers,” the agency does not even regulate them as water carriers. Small stuff. Housekeeping has a place. There is more coming.

The heavy-truck speed-limiter rule, fought over for the better part of a decade, was pulled from the agenda in 2025. Barrs has said the agency is moving roughly ten rulemakings and wants notices of proposed rulemaking out by the end of summer. A second broker transparency proposal is on the calendar.

So are an ELD technical-spec refresh, a framework for autonomous trucks, expanded Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse access, CDL testing flexibility, and a MAP-21 registration overhaul. Some of that is deregulation.

Some of it is modernization that happens to be labeled deregulation because the regulatory-budget framework rewards anything you can score below zero. Worth watching which is which. While the FMCSA was deleting glovebox manuals, the same building, under the same administrator, was running the most aggressive fraud crackdown in history.

Derek Barrs got to FMCSA roughly eight months ago and hit the ground running. At the Mid-America Trucking Show in March, he and his team described concurrent specialized investigations running in coordination with federal law enforcement, and Barrs admitted the scale of what they were finding caught him off guard.

He described single addresses tied to more than 100 separate companies, including one address sitting on an interstate highway. He said investigators found 400 to 500 carriers claiming the same principal place of business, and upwards of 2,000 carriers operating out of P. O. boxes, UPS Stores, and Staples counters.

There is a now-infamous cluster of around 600 carriers that once occupied a single small building. That is the chameleon problem. A carrier racks up a record, gets shut down, and reincarnates the next morning under a new name and a fresh DOT number with a clean slate.

Federal investigators have found that these reincarnated outfits have roughly a 3-fold higher rate of serious crashes than legitimate new entrants.

The quadruple-fatal crash in Indiana tied to AJ Partners brought every vector together in one wreck: an undisclosed network of affiliated entities, a sham CDL school that trained the driver, and an unvetted driver behind the wheel. Sen. Jim Banks called for action. Rep. Harriet Hageman filed a bill to wipe out ch