Congress named a bill after a five-year-old girl who cannot walk, talk, or eat because a driver with an illegally issued CDL hit her car at more than 60 miles per hour. Senator Jim Banks introduced the Dalilah Law in February of this year, and I have written at length about what is in the bill, what it gets right on English proficiency and lifetime CDL disqualification, and what it walks past entirely. What I have not yet written about is how Dalilah’s Law intersects with the other enormous legal development that will define how this industry handles accountability for crashes in 2026 and beyond: Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, currently sitting before the United States Supreme Court with oral arguments on March 4th.
Everyone makes the noise, but few understand the scope and depth of the perspective and context that paints the entire story here.
These two things look like separate issues from 30,000 feet. CDL reform on one side. Broker liability on the other. As a driver, fleet owner, former executive, and freight broker turned risk guy and crash litigation guy, they are not separate. They are the same problem wearing different clothes, and the reason they are the same problem is that the freight most likely to be hauled by a driver with a fraudulently obtained CDL, or a chameleon carrier, or a reincarnated authority, or an operator with an out-of-service rate that should disqualify them from any serious shipper’s routing guide, is the freight that moves through the spot market to whoever answers the phone at the lowest rate. That is how Partap Singh, the driver who hit Dalilah Coleman, ends up on a load. That is how the carriers I have been tracking for a decade end up on loads. That is how it works, and neither bill addresses the mechanism that makes it possible.
Case in point: after the Indiana Amish crash three weeks ago, the carrier remained on the highway, hauling freight for the same shippers it had always hauled for. The death of four had no bearing on whether shippers and brokers continued to provide that carrier with freight.
The reality of how freight moves
The public mental model of trucking is a shipper with a dock, a carrier with a truck, a handshake, and a delivery. That is not how the overwhelming majority of freight moves, and it is definitely not how the freight that generates the most dangerous crashes moves.
Most freight moves through intermediaries. It starts with a shipper who either has a contract carrier network or does not. If they have a contract network, those carriers are their first call. When those carriers reject the load, which is what a tender rejection represents, the shipper or the shipper’s 3PL goes to the spot market. At the end of 2025, tender rejection rates hit multi-year highs, topping 13% during the peak holiday period, indicating shippers were scrambling for spot capacity at levels not seen since early 2022. During the freight recession, when the market was at its worst, rejections were below 4%. The market is tightening fast, and every load that gets rejected by a contract carrier goes to a broker who has to find someone willing to haul it.
That is the pool. The carriers who answer those calls are either those with extra capacity or those who need the load badly enough to answer calls that contracted carriers are turning down. Some of them are excellent operators who simply have open trucks. A lot of them are the ones nobody else wanted to call. This is not a moral judgment. It is a market structure reality. In a tightening freight environment, the spot market becomes the relief valve for loads that better carriers decline, and it gets priced down until someone takes it.
The broker’s job in that transaction is officially to arrange the transportation. In practice, it is to find the cheapest carrier to move the load. That is not an accusation. That is the function brokers serve in the spot market. The margin they make is the spread between what the shipper paid and what the carrier accepted, and in a market where shippers are still pushing back on rate increases despite rising rejections, that margin pressure gets passed directly down to carrier rates.
What carrier selection actually looks like
I was a CDL driver. I was a freight broker agent. I owned trucks and a small fleet. I owned a brokerage. I worked as a fleet executive for PE enterprise companies. I have been on every side of the phone call that makes carrier selection happen, and I can tell you with authority that the actual carrier selection process in the spot market is almost never as rigorous as what a compliance manual suggests.
The practical standard for most spot market carrier selection is this: Does FMCSA say the carrier is satisfactory or not-rated? If yes, we’re done. Complete the carrier packet. Provide a W9, Insurance, etc., and here is your rate confirmation, BOL, etc.
That is the complete vetting process for the vast majority of transactions. Does the DOT number pull up clean? Is the authority active? Is the insurance current? Satisfactory or not-rated? Fine. You have the load.
The problem is that a satisfactory rating is a snapshot of whether a carrier passed its last compliance review, which is often a small sample of its operational profile. I’ve done over 100 of these. It is not a rolling assessment of what is happening on their trucks today. I have pulled the data. I have run the analysis. There are carriers operating right now with satisfactory ratings from FMCSA who have killed multiple people in the past two years and injured dozens more. They still show satisfactory because the compliance review cycle has not caught up with their current performance, or because their CSA scores have not crossed the intervention threshold that would trigger a new review, or because they are newer authorities without enough history for a full rating. The $75 tool that checks their authority status does not tell you any of that, and most brokers are not using anything beyond it.
This is why the government’s position in Montgomery is so troubling. The United States government filed an amicus brief in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, arguing that holding brokers liable for negligently selecting carriers would impose an undue burden on interstate commerce because brokers are entitled to rely on FMCSA data as their vetting standard. The government is arguing that a system it cannot fully maintain, does not update in real time, and has acknowledged in its own reports is insufficient to accurately reflect carrier safety risk, should serve as the safe harbor that protects brokers from accountability for every selection decision they make.
The Ninth Circuit and the Sixth Circuit both got this right. Cox v. Total Quality Logistics, from the Sixth Circuit in 2025, involved a carrier called Golden Transit whose safety record was so bad that more than 7 out of every 10 of its trucks were not legally allowed to be on the road. The broker put a load with them anyway. Total Quality Logistics had access to the same FMCSA data as every broker. They saw what was there and moved the freight because it was cheap. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of C.H. Robinson this summer, that will be the standard the industry locks in. You can look at a 70 percent OOS fleet and still tender freight to them, and the injured party has no recourse against the entity that made that selection.
The case started with a 2017 crash in Illinois. C.H. Robinson brokered a load of plastic pots to Caribe Transport II. Caribe’s driver veered off the road and hit Shawn Montgomery. Both the district court and the Seventh Circuit found for Robinson, holding that the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994 preempts state negligent selection claims against brokers. The Court took the case in October 2025 because four circuits are equally split. A decision comes before July.
The exempt commodity loophole and where the worst carriers work
Before you can understand why Dalilah’s Law and Montgomery are connected, you need to understand a piece of this that most people never discuss, which is that a significant portion of freight in this country moves under an arrangement where broker authority is not required, the carriers involved are not subject to the same compliance infrastructure as regulated freight carriers, and nobody is responsible for vetting the safety of the operator putting the truck on the load.
FMCSA’s own published guidance states: if the underlying transportation is exempt from commercial jurisdiction, and you would not need motor carrier operating authority to transport the commodity, you do not need broker authority to broker it. FMCSA uses garbage as its own example.
Municipal solid waste. Scrap metal. Certain construction debris. Various agricultural commodities. In some arrangements, government freight movements fall outside the definitions of regulated commerce. If you are arranging the movement of those commodities, you are not a broker under federal law. You do not need a $75,000 surety bond. You do not need a broker authority from FMCSA. You can put any carrier you want on that freight, and the regulatory framework that governs broker-carrier selection decisions in regulated freight does not apply to you.
The carriers who end up moving this freight are largely the same carriers that cannot access better shippers’ routing guides because their safety performance disqualifies them. They bid low because they have to. They bid low because they can, because without the overhead of proper compliance infrastructure, they have a cost structure that legitimate carriers cannot match without losing money. The shipper, government entity, or municipality awarding the contract usually selects the lowest bidder because the commodity has no tangible cargo value. Nobody cares if the garbage arrives safely. The shipper’s only concern is that it disappears. The result is a pipeline that routes the most problematic operators to the most vulnerable stretches of the work: the heavy equipment, the residential streets, and the highway runs where the truck will be around other people, with the least oversight over who is operating it.
This is where Partap Singh ends up. This is where the networks I track find their work when they lose access to regulated freight lanes. The fraud networks, the chameleon carriers, and the reincarnated authorities do not exclusively haul garbage, but they find their way into the exempt-commodity pipeline because that is where the barrier to entry is lowest, the scrutiny is minimal, and the question of who put them on the load is legally unanswerable.
Then there’s interlining freight carrier to carrier
Before you can understand where the accountability gaps live, you have to understand the difference between interlining and brokering, because the industry conflates them and the law treats them very differently. Interlining is a carrier-to-carrier arrangement. The originating carrier cannot complete the move, whether due to distance, equipment, regulatory jurisdiction, or capacity, and hands the shipment to a second carrier at a transfer point. Both carriers hold appropriate operating authority. Both carry insurance covering their portion of the move. Both sign documentation. The liability follows the freight, and when something goes wrong, you can trace it to whichever carrier had it at the time. Brokering is different in every meaningful way. A broker does not touch the freight. A broker does not transport anything. A broker arranges transportation between a shipper and a carrier for compensation, and under federal law, that specific function requires broker authority, a $75,000 surety bond, and recordkeeping obligations. In an interlining arrangement, both carriers are co-participants in a single move, and each owns a share of the liability. In a brokered arrangement, the broker is the matchmaker, and the carrier is the sole operator, which is exactly why the question of who the broker matched with matters so much, and exactly why the industry has spent thirty years trying to avoid being accountable for that answer.
The freight seldom just goes from shipper to carrier
Dalilah’s Law is specifically about CDL eligibility. It will disqualify undocumented drivers, require English proficiency, create a lifetime bar from CMV operation for those who drive without proper status, and tie federal highway funding to state enforcement. I have explained all of this in previous writing. I believe the lifetime disqualification provision is meaningful, and the English proficiency regulatory lock-in is well-structured.
The bill does not address how a driver like Partap Singh gets on a load in the first place. It addresses whether he is legally eligible to have the CDL he used. It does not address the selection decision that put him in the seat on that day, or who made that decision, or whether that entity had any obligation to verify what they were selecting.
In virtually no case involving a serious crash does freight move in a straight line from a shipper who cares about safety directly to the carrier who caused the crash. It moves through intermediaries. It moves through brokers. It moves through spot market transactions where the last question anyone asks before the rate confirmation goes out is whether the driver has good English or a clean safety record. It moves through load boards and TMS systems and automated matching algorithms that check the status boxes and move on. The chain between the shipper’s loading dock and the crash scene runs through multiple commercial decisions, and Dalilah’s Law touches one link in that chain, the CDL itself, while leaving the rest of the chain untouched.
Montgomery could touch more of that chain. If the Court rules for Montgomery and establishes that state negligent selection claims against brokers are not preempted by federal law, every broker in the country faces a new standard of care for carrier vetting. You cannot put a carrier on a load with a 70 percent OOS rate and defend your selection by pointing at a satisfactory rating that has not been updated since the last compliance review. You have to look at the data and use it. There are tools and services that pull crash history, OOS rates, violation patterns, and authority history in ways that FMCSA’s basic status check does not. If brokers face real liability for negligent selection, they will use those tools. They will make better selections. Some of the carriers I have been documenting for years would stop getting loads.
What the bond crisis tells you about where the market is
There is one more piece of this that nobody is connecting to the safety conversation, and it is directly relevant to who the worst carriers are hauling freight for and to the condition of their cash flow.
The Transportation Intermediaries Association reported a 65 percent surge in fraud complaints between September 2024 and February 2025. Double brokering, where a fraudulent entity takes a load and rebrokers it to a real carrier without anyone’s knowledge, costs the industry between $500 million and $700 million a year. By mid-2025, one fraud tracking service had flagged 619 carriers for verified double brokering based on more than 75,000 complaints. The scheme is textbook: buy an old MC number with a clean history, operate for a few weeks, rack up unpaid loads, disappear, reappear under a new identity. This is chameleon carrier logic applied to brokerage fraud.
When the worst carriers get caught in these arrangements, they are frequently not paid at all or are paid pennies on the dollar by a broker that is either insolvent, fraudulent, or operating on the edge of both. The $75,000 surety bond, intended to protect carriers from non-payment, was set at that level by MAP-21 over a decade ago and has never been adjusted. When a broker fails, and multiple carriers have claims against the same bond, claims are paid pro rata. The average claim is approximately $1,900. The bond is divided 50 ways, and carriers recover only a fraction of what they are owed. About one in five brokers that experiences a drawdown on their bond have claims that exceed $75,000, meaning the bond is insufficient to cover what is actually owed.
The FMCSA’s January 2026 bond enforcement changes tightened the rules considerably, requiring brokers to maintain fully collateralized trust funds or proper surety bonds and giving sureties the authority to move for suspension of a broker’s operating authority when a legitimate claim goes unpaid. This is a meaningful improvement. It also landed at exactly the moment when broker margins are compressed to multi-year lows, mid-market brokers are operating under leveraged credit facilities with covenants tied to gross margins that their shipper contracts no longer support, and the spot market is just now starting to tighten after three years of a freight recession that drove thousands of carriers and brokers out of business.
The cash flow math on all of this hits the carriers hardest, who are already operating on the thinnest margins. A small carrier or owner-operator who hauls a load, waits 45 days, files a bond claim, waits another 90 days, and recovers $400 on a $2,200 invoice has not just lost that load’s margin. They have lost the capital they needed to operate safely, maintain equipment, and pass their next inspection. The financial desperation that the factoring system creates is amplified when it is not just about slow payment but about non-payment. The carriers most likely to be working for brokers who eventually skip out are the ones who cannot get into better networks, cannot get QuickPay programs because their safety profile makes them unattractive to shippers who offer them, and are taking whatever load will keep the truck moving.
Financial desperation has a safety cost. When a carrier cannot make their next insurance payment or fuel bill because the last three loads went to bond claims, which were divided among 40 creditors, the decision to skip a brake inspection or push past hours is made in a different context than it would be otherwise. This is not an excuse. It is a systems observation. The bond non-payment crisis and the safety crisis are the same crisis from different angles.
Dalilah’s law cannot fix what it does not address
The bill Senator Banks introduced is real legislation that addresses a real problem. A driver who entered the country illegally in 2022, obtained a CDL through California’s permissive licensing framework, and hit a five-year-old girl at 60 miles per hour because nobody was checking what they were supposed to check represents a genuine failure that deserves a legislative response. The lifetime disqualification provision, the English proficiency regulatory lock-in, and the funding withholding mechanism are meaningful tools.
But Dalilah Coleman was not hit because Partap Singh had a CDL. She was hit because someone made a selection decision, and she was on a road where that decision eventually expressed itself as a crash. The CDL is the end of the enforcement chain. The selection decision is somewhere back in the middle. The load board tender is at the beginning. None of that chain gets touched by a bill that focuses exclusively on who is eligible for the credential.
The chameleon carrier networks I document in my investigative work do not depend on undocumented drivers. They depend on authority recycling, shell entities, insurance fraud, and the ability to put a new DOT number in front of a broker who checks the status boxes and moves on. The 496 individuals I found who collectively control 9,571 carriers responsible for 15,767 crashes, 9,031 injuries, and 584 deaths are not hiding because of their immigration status. They are hiding in plain sight in the same FMCSA data that the government is telling the Supreme Court brokers should rely on as their complete due-diligence standard.
Montgomery and Dalilah’s Law both point to parts of the same broken structure. One addresses who can drive. The other will address whether anyone is accountable for choosing who drives. Neither one, as currently written, addresses the machinery of the spot market that ensures the worst operators keep getting loads until the body count forces someone to look.
The real accountability question is not just whether the driver had a valid CDL. It is who decided to put that driver on that load, what they knew or should have known when they did it, and whether the regulatory and legal framework we have built around that decision creates any actual consequence for getting it wrong. Right now, the answer to that last question is mostly no. The government just went to the Supreme Court to keep it that way.
This article is a commentary by an independent contributor and does not represent the views or policies of FreightWaves. Rob Carpenter is VP of Compliance at TruckSafe Consulting, founder of www.theteaintel.com carrier intelligence platform, an independent contributor to FreightWaves, a Certified Director of Safety, a Certified Director of Maintenance//Equipment, driving instructor, and an expert witness in highway accident litigation. He has been a CDL driver, freight broker agent, fleet owner, and brokerage owner; a PE fleet executive; holds a CPC in Transport Management in the UK; and advises some of the largest fleets, captives, providers, and insurers worldwide.
