EPA’s war on diesel is a national security issue

On July 9, the Environmental Protection Agency signed a proposed rule that would stop new diesel engines from cutting a truck’s speed when the emissions system throws a fault. Instead of a derate, the driver gets a beep and a light. A virtual hearing runs July 29 and 30, and written comments close Aug. 29.

Sixteen years after the EPA required manufacturers to develop a strategy to slow a loaded truck to 5 mph on an interstate shoulder, the agency now says its own mandate causes needless frustration, operational delays, and real economic hardship. Its words, on its own website.

Six days before that proposal, President Trump pardoned nine men convicted of defeating the exact system the agency now admits is broken. Two more names in the same batch were unrelated to white-collar clemency, so when you hear “eleven pardons for the diesel guys,” the accurate number is nine.

One of the nine, Mac Spurlock of Matanuska Diesel in Wasilla, Alaska, had his shop raided in 2022 by roughly 30 armed EPA agents. His crime was modifying emissions systems so trucks would not shut down at 40 below. Thirty armed agents. For exhaust. The pardons were not the story. The pardons were the ceasefire.

The war is the mandate, and the mandate still stands. What the pardons didn’t touch A presidential pardon reaches federal criminal punishment. It does not reach a civil judgment, a consent decree or the statute itself. That is not a policy preference. It is a constitutional limit. Kory Willis, who built PPEI in Lake Charles, La.

, into what he described as the largest custom tuning company in the world, was not on the July 3 list. Even if he had been, it would not have freed him.

He remains bound by a consent decree that bars him from the trade forever, enforcing a rule the government no longer believes in, over conduct the Justice Department will no longer prosecute anyone else for. Nothing that happened in January, in June, or on July 3 repealed one word of the Clean Air Act. The Blanche memo is prosecutorial discretion.

It can be reversed by the next deputy attorney general with a one-page memo on a Tuesday, the same way this one arrived. Civil liability never went anywhere: $45,268 per tampered vehicle, $4,527 per defeat device sold. And California has not moved an inch. CARB operates under its own authority and budget and does not consult the DOJ’s mood.

This is decriminalization, not legalization. The conduct stays unlawful. The federal posture becomes a mood. Businesses cannot capitalize on a mood. Banks will not lend against one. Insurers will not underwrite one. A plaintiff’s lawyer in a wrongful death case does not care what the deputy attorney general thinks.

He cares that your tractor was illegally modified, and he will put that in front of 12 people who already dislike trucks. The derate is the weapon Under the inducement rules at 40 CFR 1036.

111, an engine must begin derating on a DEF quality reading outside the manufacturer’s spec, or on open-circuit faults in the DEF tank level sensor, the DEF pump, the quality sensor, the SCR harness, the NOx sensors, the dosing valve or the tank heater. Any one of those. Not an emissions exceedance. A sensor.

The regulation derates the truck for a broken wire. Picture a 52-year-old owner-operator dropping from 65 to 5 mph in the left lane of I-81 outside Roanoke, 44,000 pounds behind him, at night, in the snow, because a DEF quality sensor is reading 21% instead of 32. 5.

The government’s position, under binding regulation, is that this is an appropriate incentive for maintaining your equipment. The government already knows better. It has said so three times, in writing, and each time it said it only to some of us.

EPA carved out ambulances and fire apparatus from the derate in 2012 because a vehicle losing power en route to a trauma center was an unacceptable outcome. It is now proposing an emergency override for stationary and nonroad engines when human life is at risk.

Tactical military vehicles can be entirely exempt from EPA emission standards under the national security exemption at 40 CFR 1068. 225, with a companion provision that exempts the fuel they burn. If the derate is safe, exempt nobody. If the derate is dangerous, the question is not whether the M1083 gets a waiver.

The question is why a Freightliner Cascadia hauling ammunition from an Army depot to a seaport does not.

The national security problem nobody has briefed I wrote in the Surface Freight Security Assessment I presented at the NDTA Surface Force Projection meeting, alongside ARTRANS and USTRANSCOM leadership, that the Department of War does not own the freight network it depends on. It rents it.

On the order of 90% of Defense Department domestic freight moves on commercial carriers, on commercial equipment, under commercial contracts, driven by commercial drivers. Which means the sealift and airlift the country plans around begins with a small carrier, a used tractor and a diesel particulate filter with 600,000 mil