More Corporate Welfare and Regulatory Capture on the horizon?

Two worrisome possibilities for truckers with the new Trump Administration, and some better policy suggestions - from me.

photo courtesy of 10-4 DC

Since President Trump took office on January 20, we have seen an avalanche of activity on numerous fronts in American governance, from Trump cleaning house with the FBI and members of the Deep State, to cutting off funding from many of the Left’s favorite patronage scams and money laundering operations, and immediately setting new ‘Border Czar’ Tom Homan to work in removing criminal elements whom are in America illegally. There is plenty to be optimistic about, and the new administration is only just getting started.

That said, no government is perfect, and there are always blind spots and areas in which we must remain skeptical, and keep the pressure on Trump 2.0 and Vice President JD Vance such that the ‘business as usual’ enjoyers don’t parasitize themselves upon the new administration and bring it into disrepute.

There are many who make fun of Trump by implying he is merely a skinsuit for the real President, Elon Musk, and while this may rub many the wrong way, as snide leftist bromides so often do, there is a kernel of truth in the uncomfortable relationship between the man behind Tesla, Twitter, and SpaceX, and returning President Trump. While Americans ought celebrate Mr Musk and his accomplishments, we must also be aware of the taxpayer financing behind some of those accomplishments, and the balance of needs of others who may not share his vision, and whom have the facts on their side to negate some of the claims Mr Musk makes to the government and to his shareholders.

First Worrisome Possibility

Of particular interest to the over 2 million truckers in the United States are comments made by Elon Musk regards Tesla in a recent earnings call, discussed in the official media website of the American Trucking Association, Transport Topics -

https://www.ttnews.com/articles/tesla-earnings-q4-2024

Tesla, whose full self-driving technology for passenger cars and taxis is eagerly awaited, also has ambitions in autonomous trucks, CEO Elon Musk hinted during the call.

“You know, we actually have a shortage of truck drivers in America,” he said. “That’s one of the limiting factors on transport. And people are humans, so they get tired.

“I have a lot of respect for truck drivers because it’s a tough job. But because it’s a tough job, there’s not that many people that want to do it. And … there are fewer people entering truck driving as a profession than are leaving it.”

Trucking is indeed facing a driver shortage and an aging driver workforce. The industry must hire about 1.2 million new drivers over the coming decade to keep pace with retirements and growing freight demand, according to American Trucking Associations calculations.

Mr Musk, I have some news for you about that supposed shortage of truckers, and the taxpayer funds which are constantly bilked by the narrative which has been built around it.

My friends at American Compass just published another essay by yours truly, today, and in it I outline policy suggestions to help fix the trucking industry; Mr Musk and the DOGE ought to take note.

https://commonplace.org/2025/02/10/a-trucking-agenda-for-trump/

This welfare project slips through any scrutiny because it is marketed as a jobs program: Truck Driver Shortage, We Cannot Get Enough Drivers. The subsidies take many forms, from funds doled out by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) to Pell Grants to $47 million in extra funding for commercial driver’s license training from the Biden administration. The trucking industry is awash in taxpayer largesse.

Unfortunately, much of this training is a revolving door. The corporate lobby group that cries the most about the driver shortage, the American Trucking Association, in one of its own reports admits: “Of the 7.8 million people employed throughout the economy in jobs related to trucking activity, 3.5 million were truck drivers in 2018. There are over 10 million CDL (Commercial Driver’s License) holders in the U.S., but most are not current drivers and not all are truck drivers.”

The ATA’s numbers track with a survey conducted by a driver advocacy organization called CDL-Drivers Unlimited, which found that there are at least 8.8 million active CDLs in America, and numbers from an organization called the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (which is a mouthful to say ‘collective state DMVs’), which claimed to NPR that America produces 450,000 new CDLs a year.

And if I am not to be believed, perhaps the National Academy of Sciences would convince you that the driver shortage narrative is bunk.

https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/27892/pay-and-working-conditions-in-the-long-distance-truck-and-bus-industries

An examination of this NAS study by our friends at LandLine pulls no punches.

https://landline.media/truck-driver-pay-study-falls-flat-but-should-put-driver-shortage-myth-to-rest/

As you can see, indications of a driver shortage are short-lived before the market corrects itself. Any evidence of a sustained, systemic driver shortage is not supported by spot and contract rate data. Data showing average hourly earnings of truck drivers since 2006 also does not indicate any changes that are typical of a labor shortage.

Yet, large carriers still believe in a driver shortage. Why? Researchers think it’s because they are constantly replacing drivers due to high turnover rates.

Increasing truck driver pay could solve the retention problem but convincing the public and lawmakers there is a driver shortage takes them off that hook.

And then there is this study from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2019

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2019/article/is-the-us-labor-market-for-truck-drivers-broken.htm

So, no, Mr Musk, there is no shortage of truck drivers, and in fact, the claim that there is one has been used to soak the taxpayer for untold hundreds of millions of dollars over the decades to put lumpenproletariat morons on the road, to everyone else’s detriment, but mostly to those of legit truckers, whose wages (on average) are frozen in time because of the constant influx of new entrants to the market.

Mr Musk ought to understand something about corporate welfare programs.

In a piece over at Medium from a few weeks ago -

Understanding Tesla’s Government Subsidies and Their Impact on Innovation

One of the most visible subsidies that has boosted Tesla’s sales is the federal tax credit for electric vehicle buyers. In the United States, Tesla customers were eligible for up to $7,500 in federal tax credits until Tesla reached the 200,000-vehicle cap in 2018.

For example, Nevada provided Tesla with approximately $1.3 billion in tax incentives to construct the Gigafactory near Reno.

Tesla has profited significantly by selling carbon credits to other automakers who do not meet regulatory emissions standards. These credits are part of government-mandated programs to encourage cleaner transportation. In 2020 alone, Tesla earned $1.6 billion from the sale of these credits, which directly contributed to its profitability.

One might argue that these subsidies are necessary for whatever reason, and they don’t “hurt” anyone but the taxpayer. Maybe, but when you take the end result of Musk’s subsidies and compare them to what the trucking industry does with theirs, its pretty clear that there is a very specific loser when trucking companies finance their turnover problem with taxpayer dollars - truckers.


https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/parent/tesla-inc

Ooof.

It seems unlikely that the DOGE, headed by Elon, are going to take away the literal billions of dollars that Musk gets from state and Fed, so maybe the trucking industry makes an easier target. And if the Elon’s intent is to render truckers obsolete, why should the taxpayer keep paying for truck driving schools? Clearly that money could be better spent on automating Tesla’s trucks.

I mean, maybe this thing should be automated - there isn’t a trucker on Earth with any self respect who would be caught dead driving this testament to the quashing of all that is good and beautiful and true in the world, a quashing made in sacrifice to the false gods of pure efficiency.

Second Worrisome Possibility

Another problem truckers ought to pay attention to and raise their voices about is the ATA’s chosen candidate to head the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), a man by the name of Derek Barrs, who has spent almost his entire life in law enforcement, and has never had to earn a living on the free market, much less drive a truck, or understand what its like to be a trucker in America in 2025.

Yours truly has obtained a letter from the ATA, National Tank Truck Carriers, and Truckload Carriers Association, in which they are encouraging new Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy to appoint Mr Barrs to head the FMCSA.

Regular readers of this Substack will be very well aware of my and other truckers criticisms of the ATA, and how they are essentially a Corporate Lobby Group who represents large ‘mega’ carriers; those same carriers being the recipients of so much taxpayer largesse that Elon Musk and the DOGE ought to slice out with a machete.

Another thing the ATA and others like them, such as the Ontario Trucking Association and Canadian Trucking Alliance, have in common is that they are all big fans of the onerous regulations on truckers that serve no other purpose than to punish good operators while the ATA, OTA, and CanTruck continue to flood the market with lumpenproles and semi or completely illiterate migrants, who show a worrying correlation in the increase in truck accidents across the board and give major cause for concern to the general public, who read headlines like this in their local newspapers -


Commercial motor vehicles involved in 60 per cent of fatal collisions in Northwestern Ontario

Of course, Canada now being governed by the soft totalitarian regime of Justin Trudeau and the Laurentian Elite whom he serves, telling the truth about who is behind this decidedly marked increase in fatalities is off the table.

Not for me though.

The questions we should have for Mr Barrs before he is considered to head the FMCSA are thus - will Mr Barrs listen to truckers with many decades of experience on the road, and take their suggestions to heart? Will Mr Barrs reject the strictures of wokedom, and consider that perhaps a great deal of the problems on our highways are a direct result of insourced labor from other countries? Will he overturn the Obama era memorandum that prevents law enforcement from placing those who can’t speak English out of service? Will Mr Barrs listen to academics like Karen Levy of Cornell, who correctly point out that no amount of surveillance technology and the constant punishment it represents can do anything about the incentive structures in trucking behind drivers behavior?

In other documents I have obtained about Mr Barrs, it does not seem likely.


Mr Barrs lengthy resume shows that he has done nothing but either be a cop or sit on boards; he seems to be quite the meeting enjoyer, and his latest position is with an infrastructure consulting group called HNTB.

Derekbarrscv

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Though Mr Barrs has an impressive resume for a potential bureaucrat, he has a sum total of ZERO experience in trucking outside of telling drivers how to do their jobs from ticking boxes on forms or writing tickets. Has he ever spent weeks away from home being paid minimum wage for his efforts? Ever chained up a set of trains to get over a snowy mountain pass? Sat in unpaid detention for hours?

Nope, none of that. Though I’m sure he has attended many wrecks, and knows full well the deficiencies of truck driver training in America. Will he criticize his backers at the ATA once in office? Seems doubtful.


Mr Barrs has also closely worked with the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, and was part of this working group looking into automated trucks back in 2019.

Cvsaautomationworkinggroup2019

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There is not much to be excited about here, either - its just cops and bureaucrats nerding out over definitions, signaling, and how they are going to enforce the rules of the road on robots.

Nothing about displacement of drivers, nothing about the interaction between robo-trucks and human road users, nothing about the deeper implications of flipping a switch and rendering hundreds of thousands of people unemployed.

No human element at all.


It is my contention that any potential head of the FMCSA, whose primary job is making sure that truckers are operating safely, ought to take a holistic view of the entire industry - what makes it tick, economics, training, retention, and how the most important people in the safety of trucking - TRUCK DRIVERS - are treated.

I do not believe Derek Barrs is the right guy for the job.

He’s a career cop who is being supported by the worst actors in trucking, and will act as nothing more than an enforcer of regulatory capture to the benefit of ATA membership, and at the expense of truckers, all while the ATA conspires with automated truck companies to make us unemployed.


I would beseech Secretary of Transport Duffy to ignore those for whom parastizing themselves on the taxpayer is a pillar of their business model, and whom own most of the blame for putting low quality people behind the wheel of trucks, thus making our roads less safe. We need someone with a 30,000 foot view of what is going on here, and be willing to put bureaucrats and suits in their place, as their fetish for technological solutions has done nothing to increase road safety, driver retention, or any other potentially positive development in the business.

Everyone can see it.

Secretary Duffy ought to appoint someone who knows the industry inside and out from over three decades behind the wheel.

I would also point Secretary Duffy, and his bosses, President Trump and Vice President Vance, to my recent piece at the new website of American Compass, Commonplace, which has a handful of very easily engaged solutions to help fix the problems in trucking and vastly increase the safety of our roads.

https://commonplace.org/2025/02/10/a-trucking-agenda-for-trump/



And Elon Musk of the DOGE can also help us stop wasting taxpayer money on illegitimate trucking schools putting totally inexperienced and unskilled drivers on our roads.

https://www.theblaze.com/align/a-trucker-s-open-letter-to-doge-s-vivek-ramaswamy-and-elon-musk

Thanks for reading, and please pass this to any legislator or politician who is anywhere near trying to regulate the trucking business.

Questions, comments, suggestions, corrections and Hate Mail are welcomed and strongly encouraged - gordilocks@protonmail.com