WASHINGTON — The federal government plans to take its nation-wide crackdown on non-domiciled CDLs to the next level by deploying AI to go after trucking companies that hire illegal foreign drivers.
Speaking at the 105th annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, U.S. Department of Transportation Deputy Secretary Steven Bradbury said his department and its modal agencies are “leaning into AI” and the use of advanced data analytics to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of enforcement efforts.
“One example of that is to identify fraud in the trucking industry, and identify instances where trucking companies are using illegal foreign drivers,” Bradbury told the audience during his keynote address.
“That’s happening very extensively in the country, unfortunately, and it’s eating the lunch of American truckers, because it’s driving down to unreasonable levels the compensation for truckers. Researchers and TRB could be very helpful” in supporting the initiative, he said.
DOT and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration have been pressuring states that have been slow to respond to the Trump administration’s efforts to cancel CDLs that have been unlawfully issued to foreign truck drivers by threatening to revoke their licensing authority and by withholding millions of dollars in transportation funds.
FMCSA estimated that close to 200,000 trucking jobs would be eliminated by an interim emergency rule on non-domiciled CDLs when the rule was issued in September. A federal court is holding the rule in abeyance temporarily to give FMCSA time to make potential adjustments to the rule based on thousands of public comments filed, many of which opposed it.
Bradbury used his keynote to provide a status report on the administration’s “10 for 1” deregulatory initiative that requires 10 deregulation actions for every new significant regulatory rule – those that will impose $100 million or more of costs on the U.S. economy.
At DOT, “our count is 78 [deregulatory actions] to zero [new significant rules],” he said.
“Zero doesn’t mean we don’t intend to promulgate some significant regulatory rules – we have two or three in the pipeline, but we also have another 50 deregulatory actions. The biggest one is the [rollback] of fuel economy standards. That will achieve more than $100 billion in cost savings for the U.S. economy.”
Bradbury also underscored DOT’s commitment to rolling out a regulatory framework for autonomous vehicles (AVs).
“This was something that we made advances on during the first Trump administration, and unfortunately the ball was dropped, there was something of a paralysis on the AV front for the intervening four years, and now we’re picking it up again and moving it forward. We’re also going to accelerate the process for exemptions for AVs, and provide greater guidance.”
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