They Really Are Listening to Us

A little over a year ago, I started posting on X with a specific hope in mind. It seemed a bit delusional, but I’m pretty good at doing anything someone tells me I cannot do. I blame that on my dad. Ever since I was little, he has never failed to tell me that he’s proud of me. My hope with posting on X was that the FMCSA would take notice and read my posts. I had a very strong belief that the American trucking industry was being failed by the people responsible for protecting it, and those people were my target audience. I continued researching and sharing my findings, but it felt like screaming into the void. The more I dug, the more infuriated I became with the mess. And I kept posting.

The last few years may have been some of the worst conditions this industry has ever seen. The small carriers, owner-operators, the men and women who keep this country moving, watched it unfold right in front of them as they were being uninvited from the party. And no one was doing anything about it. It seemed like we were experiencing the end times of the American trucking industry.

In March, I went to the Mid-America Trucking Show. Following Secretary Sean Duffy’s speech, in which he declared truckers the loudest group of users on the internet, I had the opportunity to interview Chief Derek Barrs and Secretary Duffy. The first question I asked was, “So, you do see our posts on X?” To which they both laughed and replied, “Yes.”

The industry’s attention, for once, is matching the scale of our problems. I don’t think we’ve had this much attention on the trucking industry, ever. In the last year, we have seen real change. The USDOT and FMCSA have acted on (almost) everything we’ve called out on social media. Non-domiciled CDLs, fraudulent ELDs, chameleon carriers, empty office spaces with 72 trucking companies “operating” out of it, and truck-driver training mills (I mean, CDL “schools”). To those of you on social media, particularly X: They are listening, I promise!

The latest big news is broker liability. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC that federal law does not shield freight brokers from state-law negligence claims when they hire unsafe motor carriers. Despite the online “crashout,” as the kids would say, this ruling does not automatically make brokers liable in every crash, but it does allow lawsuits to proceed when plaintiffs allege that a broker failed to exercise reasonable care in selecting a carrier, and the chances of the broker being held liable are far greater.

What is reasonable care? Well, that has yet to be defined.

For owner-operators and small carriers who have watched brokers profit from cheap freight rates and the speed of transactions while absorbing none of the risk when things go wrong, my hope is that this will be very good for you! It shifts the accountability calculus in a direction that should award those who have been doing it right all along.

I have spent the last year writing and speaking about fraud, regulatory failure, carrier identity schemes, and the human cost of an industry that moves too fast for most oversight mechanisms to keep pace. The work has reached our federal government. It has generated conversations I only dreamed of ever happening. There is no way I could have done this alone. It is because of the incredible support from people like David Owen that I can keep going. And I keep doing it because of you, the men and women who drive the trucks, who dispatch the loads, who have run on thin margins for far too long, and miss out on family dinner to make sure that dinner is on the table. You are not just truck drivers, you are heroes. You deserve an industry that works the way it is supposed to.

When the work is done in good faith, and the evidence holds, anything is possible.