Trump’s truck-school crackdown shows this White House cares about safety

For years, our industry has warned Washington about sham commercial driver training programs undermining safety on America’s highways. At long last, we have a White House treating this threat with the seriousness it deserves.

In a sweeping effort to restore integrity to commercial driver licensing, the Department of Transportation recently removed nearly 3,000 training providers from the federal registry and put another 4,500 on notice. That means roughly 45 percent of the 16,000 licensed truck-driver training schools could lose their accreditation unless they clean up their act.

This is what real accountability looks like.

Training schools are responsible for teaching critical safety practices, vehicle operation, and compliance with federal standards — so every driver starts their career prepared and professional. Commercial driver’s license mills, on the other hand, rush drivers through the process, often cutting corners on instruction and hands-on practice. That puts everyone on the road at risk.

For too long, these bad actors have posed as “schools,” churning out unqualified drivers on crash courses that barely touch the fundamentals of safely operating an 80,000-pound vehicle. Simply put, they prioritize profit over safety.

Yesterday’s action from the Trump administration isn’t bureaucratic housekeeping. It is enforcement. Schools that falsified records, ignored curriculum requirements, or refused to cooperate with audits have finally lost the privilege of issuing credentials. This is a long-overdue cleanup of a system that has become an open door for fraud and shortcuts.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has sent the right message: If you are running a CDL mill or handing out certificates to anyone with a pulse, your days are numbered.

But this progress only matters if the enforcement continues. A licensing system worthy of the public’s trust must be built on verification, not self-certification. All existing training providers should be re-vetted against federal and state standards to ensure they’re delivering real, hands-on, competency-based instruction. New training provider entrants must also be held to the same strict standards.

Fraudulent or non-compliant programs should be removed immediately, without grace periods. If a school cannot meet the bar, it shouldn’t be training the professionals who keep our economy moving.

The stakes are painfully clear and high. Recent federal audits found systemic failures in state licensing systems, including CDLs improperly issued to individuals without proper verifying certain work authorization or English proficiency. In California, more than 25 percent of sampled non-domiciled CDLs failed to meet federal requirements — a lapse so severe that the state ultimately revoked 17,000 licenses.

Our industry continues to invest billions in safety, because the cost of getting this wrong is measured in lives. The deadly, yet preventable crashes in Florida and California in recent months are devastating reminders of what happens when the system fails to weed out unqualified drivers before they ever get on the road.

Proper driver training is the baseline for highway safety. The path forward is simple: vet the legitimate programs, shut down the frauds, and hold every link in the chain — schools, states, and carriers — accountable.

Every American deserves to know that the person driving a commercial truck earned that responsibility. With this administration’s renewed focus, we finally have the chance to rebuild the CDL process the right way and make America’s roads safer for everyone.

Chris Spear is president and CEO of the American Trucking Associations.