FMCSA says: Less paper, more enforcement

The headline day was May 29, 2025, when Secretary Sean Duffy rolled out 52 deregulatory actions across FHWA, NHTSA, and FMCSA at once, claiming the package stripped more than 73,000 words out of the Code of Federal Regulations. FMCSA’s share was 18 rulemaking actions. February’s batch finalized a dozen of those 18, and the three rules published June 22 push the running total to 15.

The February rules were the same flavor as June’s. FMCSA made explicit that Driver Vehicle Inspection Reports can be done electronically, something the industry already assumed, but the text muddied. It pulled the requirement to carry liquid-burning flares, which almost nobody uses anyway. It carved out an exception for license-plate lamps on a tractor towing a trailer. It deleted obsolete references to “water carriers,” the agency does not even regulate them as water carriers. Small stuff. Housekeeping has a place.

There is more coming. The heavy-truck speed-limiter rule, fought over for the better part of a decade, was pulled from the agenda in 2025. Barrs has said the agency is moving roughly ten rulemakings and wants notices of proposed rulemaking out by the end of summer. A second broker transparency proposal is on the calendar. So are an ELD technical-spec refresh, a framework for autonomous trucks, expanded Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse access, CDL testing flexibility, and a MAP-21 registration overhaul. Some of that is deregulation. Some of it is modernization that happens to be labeled deregulation because the regulatory-budget framework rewards anything you can score below zero. Worth watching which is which.

While the FMCSA was deleting glovebox manuals, the same building, under the same administrator, was running the most aggressive fraud crackdown in history.

Derek Barrs got to FMCSA roughly eight months ago and hit the ground running. At the Mid-America Trucking Show in March, he and his team described concurrent specialized investigations running in coordination with federal law enforcement, and Barrs admitted the scale of what they were finding caught him off guard. He described single addresses tied to more than 100 separate companies, including one address sitting on an interstate highway. He said investigators found 400 to 500 carriers claiming the same principal place of business, and upwards of 2,000 carriers operating out of P.O. boxes, UPS Stores, and Staples counters. There is a now-infamous cluster of around 600 carriers that once occupied a single small building.

That is the chameleon problem. A carrier racks up a record, gets shut down, and reincarnates the next morning under a new name and a fresh DOT number with a clean slate. Federal investigators have found that these reincarnated outfits have roughly a 3-fold higher rate of serious crashes than legitimate new entrants. The quadruple-fatal crash in Indiana tied to AJ Partners brought every vector together in one wreck: an undisclosed network of affiliated entities, a sham CDL school that trained the driver, and an unvetted driver behind the wheel. Sen. Jim Banks called for action. Rep. Harriet Hageman filed a bill to wipe out chameleon operations, and the Teamsters backed it.

FMCSA’s answer has been to restore principal-place-of-business enforcement and put real teeth behind it. Barrs said it plainly: we have to unmask chameleon carriers. The agency is relying on 49 CFR 386.73, which permits it to issue out-of-service and record-consolidation orders when it determines that an entity is operating under a new identity to evade its history. It is enforcing the 48-hour records availability standard so that a “ghost office” cannot hide behind a mail drop. On March 13, it published a bulletin warning carriers not to buy or sell DOT numbers, which is not something the agency does for routine matters. The FMCSA is replacing 40-year-old registration plumbing with MOTUS, built to capture shared addresses, phones, and personnel at the point of registration rather than after the crash.

The agency has purged 42 non-compliant ELDs and blocked 238 more from self-certifying, with hundreds of registrations blocked since last September. It has shut down 550 sham CDL schools after in-person audits and has removed more than 7,000 schools from the Training Provider Registry since 2025. Barrs told the ATA mid-year session in May that the agency had removed more than 20,000 drivers from service. It is adding 39 investigator positions and retraining them away from roadside inspection toward network mapping and probing the affiliations a clipboard never catches. Congress is moving the SAFE Act to require the FMCSA to build an automated tool that flags suspicious registrations before a USDOT number is ever issued. 

So which is it? Is this administration deregulating trucking or regulating it harder? The honest answer is both, and the two are not at war if you do them right.

The deregulation that works is the kind that hits the honest 95% of the industry. The owner-operator who kept a manual in the cab and a form in a folder for no reason was carrying weight that served no purpose. Take it off. That frees up the carrier’s time and, just as important, frees up the agency’s attention for the fringe that is actually killing people. Every hour an investigator is not chasing a redundant inspection-report mailing is an hour he can spend mapping a ghost-office network. Cutting compliance theater and funding real enforcement are the same move.

The rules that are being cut are paperwork. The rules FMCSA is adding are identity, affiliation, and accountability at the front door. Those are not in the same category. Increased enforcement and reduced regulation can live in the same house.

Cut the dumb rules. Keep them cut. Keeping the enforcement hammer in the other hand is what saves lives, and that’s the ball we’ve got to keep our eye on.