Further Suggestions for U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy

He's off to a great, though delayed start - here is a list of other issues he ought investigate.

Last Friday saw a pretty momentous set of announcements from the United States Department of Transportation, as well as a trucking media appearance for DOT Secretary Sean Duffy which showed the kind of responsiveness to citizens within his domain of responsibility long abandoned by most politicians. This abandonment has caused a great many of us to become deeply cynical about the state. No more, apparently; at least for now.

Here is the main announcement taken directly from the US DOT website -

President Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy Announces Nationwide Audit of States Issuing Non-Domiciled Commercial Driver's Licenses

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy announced today that the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) is launching a nationwide audit into state practices in issuing non-domiciled Commercial Driver's Licenses (CDLs), specifically reviewing the potential for unqualified individuals obtaining licenses and posing a hazard on our roads. This action responds directly to a key directive from President Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order on Enforcing Commonsense Rules of the Road for America’s Truck Drivers and is part of Secretary Duffy’s commitment to safety.

“The open borders policies of the last administration allowed millions to flood our country – leading to serious allegations that the trucking licensing system is being exploited. Today, we are launching a nationwide audit to get to the bottom of this,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy. “Our audit is about protecting the safety of families on the road and upholding the integrity of CDLs held by America’s truckers. Every state must follow federal regulations, and ensure only qualified, properly documented drivers are getting behind the wheel of a truck.”

USDOT has directed the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) to conduct a nationwide compliance review of states issuing non-domiciled CDLs. The review will examine state procedures for issuing non-domiciled CDLs to identify and stop any patterns of abuse and ensure federal standards are being met across the country.

The U.S. Department of Transportation remains committed to supporting America's truckers, who work every day to keep our nation’s economy moving.

If the rhetoric in this announcement sounds familiar, that is because my friends at American Truckers United have been working on this issue for years, and I have featured their work and interviews with them here, as well as referenced their work in numerous publications outside of Substack which have been forwarded to the administration through various channels.

You read that correctly - Secretary Duffy is responding directly to the concerns of ATU, and as has been told to me by advisers to the administration, they read my work and have taken our concerns seriously.

It takes time to feel the effects of legislation and government action, good or bad, but the fact that the Biden Administration doubled the annual production of CDLs in 2022 with no increase in the training capacity nor examiners to do so should have immediately raised red flags at the time. Your humble servant at this Substack, in 2022 and 2023, was a little busy working 70+ hours a week hauling logs, and when I wasn’t doing that I was here writing about how the Canadian government and media were lying their asses off about the Freedom Convoy, and how they railroaded four men and brought political prisoners to Canada. Tony Olienick and Chris Carbert remain in prison to this day, and tomorrow is Canada Day, and all Canadians should be ashamed of themselves for turning a blind eye when Justin Trudeau really did turn the place into a Maple Gulag - I have used that phrase often, BECAUSE ITS TRUE.

More on that another time.

If you want to hear directly from Secretary Duffy, here he is on friend and colleague Timothy Dooner’s show What The Truck? over at FreightWaves -

We shall see what the enforcement of English Language Proficiency standards look like, and what these audits produce, but it sure smells like Biden’s doubling of CDL issuance in 2022, and the loopholes opened up by his administration in conjunction with a number of states, have insourced a hell of a lot of illiterate, unvetted, untrained, and utterly incompetent labor on to our highways, with disastrous results in lives lost and everyone’s wage floor being pushed ever further down.

This idea that North America is a work camp for the rest of the world to extract value has got to stop - there is nowhere else for the working class here to go, this is it for us, and the more value sucked out of the bottom tier of our economy and sent elsewhere in remittances threatens the stability of the ‘pyramid’, which is already on shaky ground due to inflation, dollar devaluation, national and consumer debt that show no signs of slowing down, much less being reduced, and decades of fuckery from Wall Street and Washington DC, which has seen value scraped and sent in the opposite direction upwards from the remittances.

When places like Mexico are receiving 64 billion a year in remittances, and India 129 billion, and a great deal of North America’s trucking market has been parasitized by those and other nationals, one has to wonder just how much value has been taken out of the American trucker’s hide by all of this insourcing. Its a lot of money, and someone ought to look into just how much and where it is all going, because its not staying here. FreightWaves has an entire section of their website dedicated to Layoffs and Bankruptcies and it has been busy for the past 3 years, and shows no signs of slowing down in its reporting of how native American and often family owned small and medium sized trucking companies are going out of business or otherwise shutting down, meanwhile our roads are full to the brim with foreign drivers, many of whom have a proclivity for collisions.

We saw yet another of these incidents on Saturday in Texas, where a Cuban migrant killed five people along interstate 20 east of Dallas after falling asleep at the wheel.

Over and above questions of the issuance of his CDL, one wonders about what dodgy ass doctor cleared his mandatory drivers medical exam, given his immense girth indicates hypertension or at very least problems with sleep apnea. The cherry on top is that this guy was not escaping communism, but appears to have been an active member of a communist student organization while in Cuba which would have disqualified him for any work visa or permanent residency in the United States. How did this guy end up behind the wheel of a truck here?

Earlier on Friday, Secretary Duffy made another Pro-Trucker announcement, this time a package of several items which will be helpful to the industry.

https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/us-transportation-secretary-sean-p-duffy-unveils-pro-trucker-package-part-president

Summarized at the end of the announcement -

1. Expand Truck Parking

   • Problem: 40% of truckers spend over an hour a day searching for parking – costing our national economy billions in wasted time. It’s also a safety issue – forcing truckers to park in harms way.

   • Solution: USDOT is advancing more than $275 million in funding to expand truck parking availability and opening up additional grant programs and discretionary grants for truck parking projects.

2. Remove One-Size-Fits-All-Mandates

   • Problem: Mandating speed limiters on heavy-duty trucks isn't just an inconvenience – it is a safety hazard when drivers are forced to go slower than the flow of traffic.

   • Solution: USDOT is withdrawing the proposed rulemaking to mandate speed limiters so professional drivers can operate their vehicles safely.

3. Modernize Driver Resources

   • Problem: The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) online tools are outdated and a pain to use.

   • Solution: FMCSA is launching new digital assets that are more user-friendly, modernizing the Consumer Complaint database, and updating the DataQ system so it is more transparent.

4. Slash Red Tape & Crack Down on Bad Actors

   • Problem: Burdensome regulations make it harder for truckers to do their job while failing to go after bad actors.

   • Solution: FMCSA is proposing to eliminate 1,800 words from federal regulations, which will save truckers time and money. Concurrently, the agency has renewed its focus on unlawful double brokering—a practice that directly harms drivers.

These are all great moves, and we shall see what comes of them.

At the end of Secretary Duffy’s appearance on What The Truck? he did admit that they are stuck in DC and not out on the roads seeing what we see, and that he continues to be open to suggestions and ideas about how to further ‘Make Trucking Great Again’.

I have some ideas for the Secretary which build on what he’s already moving towards with these announcements.

1. I would suggest that in addition to the Non-Domiciled CDL issue, Secretary Duffy, US DOT, and FMCSA, need to look into state DMVs and deal with the massive amounts of Bribery we see at the local level. There have been a number of incidents around the country where driving schools or local DOT and DMV officials have given out CDLs with no testing whatsoever, including in Florida, Oregon and Washington and over in Massachusetts. Those are all fairly recent, and we must find out how deep the rot goes, and how long it has been going for. California has had a problem with this going back years now, and it must be stopped.

2. As this crash in Texas shows, we seem to have some unhealthy drivers out there on the road who can’t stay awake, and appear to be in no way ‘shape’ or ‘form’ to have legally passed a medical examination. The FMCSA is already aware of this and recently shut down two doctors for issuing dodgy medical exams - perhaps in addition to roadside English proficiency checks, they need to chase down the doctors offices who may be involved in issuing drivers medical exams to illegals, or those who are clearly not healthy enough to be behind the wheel.

3. In the above package, Secretary Duffy alludes to ‘double brokering’, a pervasive problem in the industry with all of the middlemen who have been parasitizing themselves between shippers and carriers. There are a lot of good and honest load brokers out there, and my Uncle established one of the finest in the business back in the mid 1980s. Unfortunately, however, with the growth of the internet, and the general desire on the part of some people to make easy bucks rather than work for a living, the market is saturated, and with that comes a number of bad actors who don’t follow the rules, and it is much easier to ignore those rules if your load brokerage is based overseas. A simple suggestion to end this parasitization and reduce the hazard of foreign companies engaging in that practice is to require load brokers, like the truckers who haul the loads, to be domiciled in the United States. Several of my associates in the business have made the very simple suggestion that load brokers, in order to obtain an MC number to operate, ought be required to produce a Transportation Worker Identification Credential for themselves and their staff, in the same way port workers and truckers must have one to access US Port facilities. The process to obtain a TWIC Card would guarantee that the brokerage and its employees are actually in the United States, and make it a lot easier to keep them honest. This would also slow down some of the parasitic skimming of value from the American economy into the hands of scammers in India or Serbia out of the pockets of American truckers.

4. I would submit to Secretary Duffy that he work with FMCSA, DOT, DOL, and any other relevant Federal Agencies, to stop all government funding to all truck driver training facilities and programs in the United States, right now. Everyone in the industry knows that most of these programs are garbage, and only exist to get potential drivers past the most bare minimum of testing, and that this entire industry is set up to keep the churn and retention problem in long haul trucking going. The problem has existed for decades, and every study on the problem has shown that there is no shortage of truckers, and the government money going to these schools has been internalized as a pillar of operations to many of the nations biggest carriers, rendering them, essentially, as wards of the state.
   
   Cut it all off, every penny. It is not in the taxpayers interest to continue funding any of them.

5. Secretary Duffy, as he has been following the work of American Truckers United, ought to likewise follow the work of another friend of mine, specifically Danielle Chaffin, whose investigative work into ‘Chameleon’ and ‘Ghost’ carriers reveal that we have a major, major problem with trucking companies flouting all of the rules, and then simply popping back up again under different Motor Carrier or US DOT numbers when they are shut down, and all of this masked through layer upon layer of LLCs and other obfuscating fake entities. Danielle is great and I would recommend Secretary Duffy’s staff follow her on Twitter and check out this interview I released with her over the weekend. Danielle is a real pro and would be the best kind of asset to help clean up the industry.

6. Our neighbors in Canada have a similar problem with issuing licenses to recent arrivals that do not speak English, and whom have attended some dodgy truck driving schools themselves. Many of these recent arrivals to Canada find themselves involved in the drug trade, and are constantly being caught smuggling drugs through the United States. I would submit to Secretary Duffy that he have DOT, FMCSA, CBP, and other relevant agencies, engage with their Canadian partners so as to put a stop to whatever the problem is in Canada (*cough* Punjabi Gangsters *cough*) as Canada’s trucking problems have become American trucking problems, given that traditionally, Canadian trucks haul in excess of 80% of the freight that crosses the northern border into or out of the US. Canada and America have a great and long lasting trade relationship, and recent developments in the Canadian Trucking industry shouldn’t put a hamper on that relationship, or the great carriers that do exist in Canada and whom are forced to compete with the worst of the worst. Fixing these problems could go a long way to mending the hurt caused by the Biden Administration, as President Biden and Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg were heavily involved with Prime Minister Trudeau’s crushing of The Freedom Convoy, and thus our sacred rights to protest and Freedom of Expression. Secretary Duffy has a unique opportunity to show his friends in Canada that America can move past the numerous and destructive actions and policies of the previous administration, which include their interference with the democratic rights of Canadian Truckers.

I’m sure to be missing more than a few issues here, and I would invite my readers to send me any suggestions they like - gordilocks@protonmail.com

Secretary Duffy, as mentioned here and proven by his actions, pays attention to truckers, and he reads most suggestions in the replies to his tweets.

You can follow him and make your voice heard - https://x.com/SecDuffy

I would enjoin my Canadian readers to have a Happy Canada Day tomorrow, and perhaps take some time to reflect on the utter decrepitude that has become of the place, and destructive trajectory it is heading in under the ‘leadership’ of the Laurentian Elite and the dictatorial monarchy as transmitted to us via the Privy Council and King Chuck The Third.

Do not forget Chris Carbert or Tony Olienick, who continue to rot in prison downstream of the poisonous ideologies which are ruining a once great nation.

And for my American readers, have a Happy Independence Day and enjoyable July Fourth long weekend.