EPA’s war on diesel is a national security issue

What the pardons didn’t touch

A presidential pardon reaches federal criminal punishment. It does not reach a civil judgment, a consent decree or the statute itself. That is not a policy preference. It is a constitutional limit.

Kory Willis, who built PPEI in Lake Charles, La., into what he described as the largest custom tuning company in the world, was not on the July 3 list. Even if he had been, it would not have freed him. He remains bound by a consent decree that bars him from the trade forever, enforcing a rule the government no longer believes in, over conduct the Justice Department will no longer prosecute anyone else for.

Nothing that happened in January, in June, or on July 3 repealed one word of the Clean Air Act. The Blanche memo is prosecutorial discretion. It can be reversed by the next deputy attorney general with a one-page memo on a Tuesday, the same way this one arrived. Civil liability never went anywhere: $45,268 per tampered vehicle, $4,527 per defeat device sold. And California has not moved an inch. CARB operates under its own authority and budget and does not consult the DOJ’s mood.

This is decriminalization, not legalization. The conduct stays unlawful. The federal posture becomes a mood. Businesses cannot capitalize on a mood. Banks will not lend against one. Insurers will not underwrite one. A plaintiff’s lawyer in a wrongful death case does not care what the deputy attorney general thinks. He cares that your tractor was illegally modified, and he will put that in front of 12 people who already dislike trucks.

The derate is the weapon

Under the inducement rules at 40 CFR 1036.111, an engine must begin derating on a DEF quality reading outside the manufacturer’s spec, or on open-circuit faults in the DEF tank level sensor, the DEF pump, the quality sensor, the SCR harness, the NOx sensors, the dosing valve or the tank heater. Any one of those. Not an emissions exceedance. A sensor. The regulation derates the truck for a broken wire.

Picture a 52-year-old owner-operator dropping from 65 to 5 mph in the left lane of I-81 outside Roanoke, 44,000 pounds behind him, at night, in the snow, because a DEF quality sensor is reading 21% instead of 32.5. The government’s position, under binding regulation, is that this is an appropriate incentive for maintaining your equipment.

The government already knows better. It has said so three times, in writing, and each time it said it only to some of us. EPA carved out ambulances and fire apparatus from the derate in 2012 because a vehicle losing power en route to a trauma center was an unacceptable outcome. It is now proposing an emergency override for stationary and nonroad engines when human life is at risk. Tactical military vehicles can be entirely exempt from EPA emission standards under the national security exemption at 40 CFR 1068.225, with a companion provision that exempts the fuel they burn.

If the derate is safe, exempt nobody. If the derate is dangerous, the question is not whether the M1083 gets a waiver. The question is why a Freightliner Cascadia hauling ammunition from an Army depot to a seaport does not.

The national security problem nobody has briefed

I wrote in the Surface Freight Security Assessment I presented at the NDTA Surface Force Projection meeting, alongside ARTRANS and USTRANSCOM leadership, that the Department of War does not own the freight network it depends on. It rents it. On the order of 90% of Defense Department domestic freight moves on commercial carriers, on commercial equipment, under commercial contracts, driven by commercial drivers.

Which means the sealift and airlift the country plans around begins with a small carrier, a used tractor and a diesel particulate filter with 600,000 miles on it. Deployment does not fail at the port. It fails on the road to the port, at scale. The tactical vehicle sitting on the flatbed is exempt. The tractor pulling the flatbed is not. It will drop to 5 mph in a live lane during a surge because a $200 sensor decided the urea concentration was wrong.

I spend my working life chasing the threats this industry talks about. Chameleon carriers. Identity fraud. Cargo theft. Failed enforcement. Those are real, and I have put years and court records into documenting them. But they are parasites on the system. The emissions mandate is a defect built into the system itself, federally required in every engine, capable of immobilizing the mobilization base one sensor at a time. The most serious threat to American trucking is not the criminals. It is written into the Code of Federal Regulations, which anyone could have read.

Secretary Duffy: A federally mandated speed derate on a live interstate is a highway safety issue that belongs to you, not to EPA. Say so. Secretary Hegseth: The freight that moves your force is hauled on equipment that your own regulations exempt from. Fix the asymmetry or fund the fleet. Administrator Barrs: FMCSA writes the out-of-service criteria, and no one has ever asked whether a mandated derate constitutes a vehicle defect. Ask.

One act, the whole supply chain

The administration has spent 18 months dismantling the enforcement side of this fight. The prosecutions were dropped. The DEF sensor requirement was removed, with savings that EPA and SBA jointly put at $13.79 billion a year. For one sensor. The Freedom to Fix memorandum came on June 29. The derate proposal came on July 9. Every one of those is a ceasefire. None of them is peace.

The peace is the mandate itself. Rebuilding it around how diesel equipment actually works, rather than assuming every engine in America runs I-40 at 63 mph, is a rare act that reaches the entire supply chain at once. The same aftertreatment stack sits on the truck, the tractor, the harvester, the generator, the port hostler and the ground equipment at the airfield, and its cost is priced into every load that moves by surface, air or sea. If the president wants one overarching act that solves a world of problems from the farm gate to the flight line, this is it. Not another pardon. The mandate.

Three things would start it. Kill the derate outright, for every engine, in use and new. The July 9 proposal covers new engines and states that the EPA is “considering” guidance for the in-use fleet. Considering is not a plan. Millions of trucks use the old induction logic in their ECUs today. Order the fix, fund the flash, set a deadline. Second, release the warranty data. EPA demanded aftertreatment warranty data in February, and 11 of 14 manufacturers submitted it. Publish the line item ATRI cannot get and the OEMs will not give. Third, answer the national security question. Somebody with subpoena power should ask why 40 CFR 1068.225 exempts the tactical vehicle and not the commercial tractor that carries it, and Surface Deployment and Distribution Command should be asked what happens to a port surge when 3% of the contracted fleet derates in the same week.

Nineteen days

The docket is EPA-HQ-OAR-2026-0728. The virtual hearing runs on Wednesday, July 29, starting at 9 a.m. Eastern, and on Thursday, July 30, at 10 a.m. To testify, register by emailing EPA-HD-MobileSource-Hearings@epa.gov by July 22. Written comments close Aug. 29.

Every fleet manager, every owner-operator, every rural fire chief, every farmer who has watched a tractor drop to a crawl in a harvest window has standing to speak into that record, and the record is the only thing that survives an administration.

Nine men got their names back. The statute that took them is untouched, loaded, and sitting on the shelf. The ceasefire is not peace.

Show up.

To learn more about the history of the Clean Air Mandate, the Pardons, and the cases, or to contact your representative, you can head to www.dieselmandate.com