More ELD Companies Decertified (Part 2)

Below is part 2 of an article that was featured in last quarter’s newsletter from David Owen’s desk concerning the shortsighted nature of many rules, regulations, and laws that come out of Washington. If you recall, the letter was directed at the cost to small trucking companies and owner-operators because FMCSA allowed ELD manufacturers to self-certify.

Does anyone inside the beltway ever consider the tremendous amount of money that must be absorbed by trucking companies, drivers, shippers, receivers, and the consuming customer at the end of the supply chain, to “re-do” over and over the mandates from DOT and FMCSA?

Going back some twenty-five years when the FMCSA was formed, please humor us while we exercise a little critical questioning concerning performance:

1. Why were ELD’s mandated in the first place?

As we have made clear for almost 35 years, NASTC is and has always been adamantly opposed to the MANDATE! We have always maintained that the decision to use ELD’s or paper should be a COMPANY POLICY decision not a one-size-fits-all requirement. More than 50% of companies forced to use ELD’s never approach an hour-of-service violation.

Besides that, the almost eleven-year experiment with Werner Enterprises proved that there continued to be a huge gap between HOS compliance and actual safety (i.e., accidents, fatalities, and property damage). FMCSA’s own study on the cost-benefit analysis came up with 17 lives saved annually which is in fact and retrospect, statistically insignificant. Our safety numbers have gone up drastically, and many believe that the ELD mandate has cost lives, not saved them.

2. Why is it that there is zero requirement in the regs for companies to audit logs?

NASTC has maintained that it should be a requirement for all active MC credentialed carriers to audit all driver logs and be responsible for on-going enforcement and training with the HOS. This would have codified a high level of HOS compliance at a fraction of the cost of ELD’s.

3. Why were companies supplying mandated ELD’s allowed to self-certify? Why were companies required to start using this technology before it was clear to the product providers, FMCSA, and the trucking companies exactly how they were to be designed? Why were they demanded before the enforcement community was trained to read the data uniformly and supplied with the proper technology to do their respective jobs?

If this were an isolated example of Congress, FMCSA, CVSA and ATA promulgating and developing well-meaning but half-baked laws, regs, and guidances that were rolled out for our industry indiscriminately without any regard for small carriers, owner-operators, or the driving public, NASTC might be inclined to give them a pass. However, that is just not the case. I have grown tired of “unintended consequences.”  

Other examples include:

1. The establishment of the Certified Medical Examiners Directory

This well-meaning, half-baked idea has had the following UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES:

– It effectively eliminated a qualified MD pool in rural areas and small towns and replaced them with chiropractors, nurse practitioners and inside the beltway MDs connected to sleep doctors.

– This directory was established to mitigate the chance that practicing MDs in rural areas could be taking payoffs under the table to pass unqualified drivers to get their medical cards. Ironically, it wasn’t until after this directory was in place that a chiropractor in South Georgia was convicted of this exact practice and 10,000+ medical cards were decertified because of this pay-for-play scheme.

– This also led to the out-of-control Apnea scare that was promulgated by CME’s trained in STOP-BANG protocol implying that, to quote Joan Claybrook, Co-Founder of Parents Against Tired Truckers (PATT) “that 65% of America’s truck drivers have apnea and that is equal to or worse than, driving drunk.” The connection between apnea and driver fatigue was exaggerated out of context so badly that almost all male drivers over fifty were forced to take sleep studies to prove they didn’t have an ailment that WE ALL HAVE. By the way, this entire blunder was put in play through GUIDANCE and as such didn’t have to accommodate The Administrative Procedures Act.

– The latest unintended negative consequence is going on as we speak. FMCSA in an effort to go paperless without the proper preparation, came out with the “improvement” that did away with the requirement for drivers to have a physical medical card on their person. Unfortunately for the industry, our companies, and our drivers, FMCSA didn’t co-ordinate with a dozen or so states who weren’t prepared to go paperless.

Since our guys and gals are in interstate commerce, they could possibly be in 10-15 states in a single week whereby they may be legal in some and put out of service in others. Why couldn’t someone in the beltway anticipate this?

2. Another example is the not-so-new requirement for pre-CDL entry level driver training. NASTC was one of 26 organizations asked to participate in a “reg-neg” or negotiated rule making concerning this requirement. There have only been two of these in transportation’s history and this one was ordered because Congress had passed a resolution requiring such training back in the 1980’s and no one within the government could figure out how to implement it without violating The Administrative Procedures Act. We were advised at the beginning of this year-long exercise that FMCSA could only implement our complete recommendations if there was a consensus of at least twenty-four of the twenty-six represented groups. NASTC was one of 2 dissenting votes. Without digging into the details, we dissented because we wanted more “behind-the-wheel” training, and we felt there was no evidence that there would be a cost benefit. We also felt that a negative or unintended consequence would be that a young individual would have to spend a substantial amount of time and money with a “self-certifying” training school, only to find out he was not cut out for long haul trucking. That last objection has proven to be correct and our pool of potential new entrants as CDL holders has been flooded with non-citizens, non-English speaking and sometimes, illegal immigrants that have circumvented the proper and legal path to a CDL. Once again this is an example of poor communication and procedural guidance from FMCSA to the various State Motor Vehicle Administrators. Also, it brings into question the many CDL schools that have sprung up around the country without proper vetting. Can we expect in a few years to start getting notices from FMCSA listing training schools that are no longer certified?
3. There are other glaring examples of mismanagement and negligence by FMCSA over their very short twenty-five year history such as allowing EPA to go beyond low sulfur diesel to ultra-low sulfur diesel, the introduction of catalytic converters, DEF, and all the associated and expensive problems caused by false positives, poor design, and parts and supply issues put in place in conjunction with the EPA and The Green New Deal. The not ready for prime time mandate for automatic braking systems, and the grandaddy of them all, The Compliance, Accountability, and Safety debacle that continues to not only be dysfunctional in rating carriers but has put 100’s of perfectly safe carriers out of business because of distorted data and design flaws.

What went so badly wrong?

To begin with FMCSA became a DEI, political football that has only listened to self-serving, inside the beltway, ideas and proposals. CVSA, The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance is a Non-government Ad hoc committee that is dominated by safety organizations, labor unions, and retired enforcement people. They are non-elected, and they answer only to FMCSA and The American Trucking Association, who funds them with tax-payer dollars. They pick and choose who will be FMCSA’s administrator and who will sit on the Motor Carrier Advisory Board. With the exception of Todd Spencer and OOIDA, there is no representation from our hundreds of thousands of million-mile drivers, and their policies and programs seem to be designed not only to make entry into trucking difficult but also to eliminate the owner/operator model entirely.

As I stated before I’m weary of unintended consequences and after the fact apologies when practices from inside the beltway, classrooms and laboratories have an obvious and measurable negative outcome for our industry and the safety of the driving public.

NOTE: As we speak (mid-February 2026), there is underway a restructuring of the Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Board. I certainly hope that our industry is more equitably represented going forward. NASTC is on record as recommending a couple of appropriate candidates who have shown an interest in serving and who are very qualified to speak on behalf of owner-operators and small companies. We have further recommended that the advisory board consider forming a driver group that rotates every year or two that would include current multi-million mile drivers. These drivers could be supplied through ATA’s Road Team, TA/Petro’s Citizen Drivers of the Year, NASTC’s Drivers of the Year, recipients of OOIDA’s Safe Driver Awards, and Women in Trucking’s Driver of the Year. Such a group could help mitigate some of the laboratory, classroom, and inside the beltway foolishness that ends up in the regulations.