The FMCSA finally has a regulator who shows up — and the freight market is responding

That is not a coincidence. All time high records are a result of tight enforcement and a change in market direction at the hands of the regulators. 

Why this administrator resonates

Barrs is the first FMCSA administrator in my career covering this industry to be recognized by name by working truck drivers. I told him so. “I have never seen any FMCSA administrator or FMCSA period have been able to accomplish” the kind of response he and Secretary Sean Duffy received walking the Louisville truck show, I said.

His answer cut to the operating philosophy. “You have to be engaged. And when you say that you want true partnerships, you have to go where the partners are,” Barrs said. “Things do not happen sitting behind a desk. You have to be out walking. It’s kind of like managing by walking around, if you will.”

That posture extends to the field structure. “Our division administrators, they know what’s going on in their states. They know who their partners are. They know who their association members are. They’re engaged with the people that they regulate,” Barrs said. He recounted a program from his Florida Highway Patrol days putting troopers in trucks and truck drivers in patrol cars to build mutual understanding. “I want them to respect that. But then again, I also want that driver to be in the cab or in the car of that patrol car with my trooper to understand the work that they’re doing.”

The “why” behind the work is personal. Barrs described, unprompted, his earliest 911 call as a teenage dispatcher — a log truck and a passenger car on an interstate overpass that killed a young woman. He drove to the scene after his shift. “So I took the 911 call and then I also went there and then I saw what was I was hearing.” Later, as a deputy, he pulled a man out of an overturned van in pouring rain who later died at the hospital. “I learned that he was a father, he was a son, he was a husband, and he was a member of his community. And if he’d only wore a seat belt that night, he’d still be here.”

About 60% to 70% of fatalities in commercial vehicle crashes involve someone not wearing a seat belt. “My point is, this is something we’ve been talking about forever. Put your seatbelt on,” Barrs said. “We have to do a better job.”

Enforcement, not new rules, is doing the work

When I asked Barrs what success looks like, he framed it around delivery. “What keeps me up at night is making sure that we deliver. I want to make sure that we deliver on the things that we say that we’re going to do that are number one is going to enhance safety, strengthen the market, root out the bad actors so the cream will rise to the top.”

Then he made the point that every compliant carrier in this industry has been waiting to hear from a federal regulator. “If we don’t enforce the rules that we have on the books, we can add all that we want to. But if we don’t enforce the rules that we have on the books, what good are we?”

The numbers tell the story. Between 20,000 and 30,000 drivers have been placed out of service for failure to meet the English language proficiency standard since enforcement was reactivated. That standard has been on the books since 1937. It was not a new rule. It was a dormant one, and the dormancy was a choice.

Barrs walked through why the standard matters operationally. “If I’m up under a truck doing an inspection, I ask a driver to apply your brake and they start cranking up the truck because there’s not understanding exactly what that means. So, that’s a safety issue.”

International Roadcheck week wrapped last week with a combined out-of-service rate around 30% — roughly 20% on vehicles and 10% on drivers. Barrs flagged that he is seeing more acute violations during investigations now than in prior years. Brake failures. Hours-of-service violations. “If we’re seeing more acute violations and we’re constantly seeing out-of-service rates at 20% and 10% for drivers and 30 combined, that’s too many. That’s too much.”

Three and a half million roadside inspections happen every year. The argument that the industry is unregulated is wrong. The argument that the wrong things have been regulated, and that genuinely dangerous operators have been allowed to compete on price against compliant carriers, is correct. Barrs is reversing that.

Killing self-certification

When I asked Barrs what he most wanted to accomplish during his tenure, his answer was unambiguous. “When I found out we had these self-certification programs, I said, ‘Well, if we could just get rid of self-certification, I will feel that we have done something.'”

The fraud problem in trucking has always traced back to the same structural failure. ELD providers self-certify that their devices meet federal standards. Entry-level driver training (ELDT) providers self-certify that they have trained a new CDL holder competently. Substance abuse providers self-certify that they have evaluated a driver appropriately. The result has been a race to the bottom, populated heavily by overseas-controlled entities operating in regulatory gray zones.

“The self-certification pieces need to go,” Barrs said. “And of course that’s ELDs, that’s entry-level driver training. We’ve talked a lot back and forth with some of the folks about substance abuse providers where that is actually taking place as well where fraud is kind of rooting in the system.”

Matt pressed on the ELDT problem specifically — the idea that a CDL mill could certify a driver as proficient in 24 hours or two days. Barrs did not flinch: “We are, and that’s a self-certification piece, and we got to reform that. And that is on the horizon for us to get through.” He continued: “Driving a commercial vehicle and having a CDL should mean something. It should mean not that I just went down and I got them pushed out like cattle or like a candy machine. It should mean you actually have to go through a rigorous training to be able to be behind the wheel of the commercial motor vehicle.”

On the ELD ecosystem, Barrs confirmed FMCSA has active investigations with federal law enforcement partners, with attention on overseas-operated platforms that enable back-door log editing. “FMCSA is a regulatory agency. It has regulatory authorities. It doesn’t have criminal authorities. We have to work closely with our office of inspector general. We have to work with other law enforcement agencies. We have to work with Department of Justice.”

His commitment was unambiguous: “We have active investigations with our law enforcement partners on the federal level. And we will continue to go after these through investigations to determine how they’re defrauding the government, how they’re defrauding the overall industry.”

CORCA and the cargo theft problem

We spent time on cargo theft, which Barrs identified as no longer a routine cost of business but a structural threat. “This is not just a price of doing business anymore,” he said. “I think it’s way past that now.”

Matt made the legislative pitch. “There’s this thing called Combating Organized Retail Crime Act. It’s called CORCA. It’s fun to say, even more fun to explain. It has passed the House. It is in the Senate. CORCA is the single most important piece of legislation that talks about cargo theft and fraud. It creates a way for different local and state actors to collaborate on what is happening because these are criminal cartels that are doing these things.”

The bill has more than 160 bipartisan sponsors. Every major industry association supports it. As Matt put it: “From the ATA to TIA, every alphabet soup — they’re all supporting this. So that’s my pitch. Like, go do that thing.”

This is the legislation the freight industry should be calling its senators about this month.

The conditional safety rating problem

The most consistent question I received from drivers in advance of the interview was about the conditional safety rating regime. Roughly 300,000 trucks carry a conditional rating, and after the Supreme Court’s Cornejo decision opening brokers to negligent hiring liability, that rating is functioning as a scarlet letter. One driver described being assigned the rating after a single hours-of-service violation in a small fleet, and being unable to get a re-review.

Barrs acknowledged the problem directly. “We’re going to have to look at that closely. We have congressional mandates for high-risk motor carriers to have to go in and do investigations on high-risk motor carriers. And that’s what our investigators focus on.” Reviewing remediated carriers competes against that mandate for limited investigator bandwidth. “I will take that back to our team to try to figure out what that solution is going to look like.”

He also flagged a data hygiene issue underneath the headline statistic that 87% to 90% of carriers have no safety rating at all. FMCSA sent out 2.2 million letters about the MODUS registration system. “Over 400,000 letters that we sent out came back to us. So either that’s companies that are out of business, they either haven’t updated their MCS-150, they haven’t done the things that they needed to do.”

That cleanup will mechanically improve the percentage of active carriers with ratings. It does not solve the underlying problem.

Matt framed the broader implication after the Cornejo decision. “A lot of folks in the last week have said, ‘Well, the government says they’re not — they said they’re okay, they’re safe, or they don’t have a rating, therefore I should be able to book them.’ And clearly, we all know that that is not — that in itself is not a valid argument.”

There is a clear opening for private-sector audit and rating services to fill the gap that FMCSA cannot fill given its resourcing. Barrs was open to it. “We’re looking at all different ways to help us through different tools and mechanisms from the private industry to help us to identify who are our bad actors.”

Maintenance: the issue nobody is paying enough attention to

Matt pulled the conversation toward vehicle maintenance, which has been his consistent argument on the show — that the way a carrier maintains equipment is the truest signal of how it runs its business. He pointed to the international roadcheck data showing roughly 22% of commercial vehicles get placed out of service.

Barrs’s response was immediate. “For the last 20 plus years, brakes and tires. It’s the most common violation when it comes to brakes and tires.”

He framed the fix culturally. “Safety has to be number one, has to be the foundation, has to be the culture. No matter if you’re a small fleet or a large fleet, that has to be the culture.”

He invoked Admiral McRaven’s “make your bed” speech to make the point. “Small things lead to big things. If you’ll change that marker light before you when you do that pre-trip, and you check your brakes before you go, and you do a true pre-trip inspection, you do a post-trip inspection, and you make the necessary changes that need to be made — small things lead to big things.” Then: “Pick your hard. You can either pick your hard of doing on the front end, or it’s going to cost you on the back end.”

Matt’s proposed fix: doubling the FHWA’s required annual inspection to twice a year, raising minimum liability insurance from the 1985-set $750,000, and doubling FMCSA’s budget. All three require Congress.

MODUS: closing the front door

The structural fix for fraud at the registration level is MODUS. Barrs’s framing is the one to use. “I always just in layman’s terms, I like to say that it closes the front door for fraud. And we know who we’re dealing with is what I like to say. Because right now we have no way of knowing.” The system consolidates roughly nine legacy databases into a single registration platform with ID verification through IDEMIA, business verification, and the ability to track chameleon carriers across cycles of registration and de-registration.

“If you’re inactive, or say you’re a chameleon carrier, we placed you out of service, and then you try to come back into the system again, we’ll be able to understand and be able to see that data,” Barrs said.

There will be bugs. There already are bugs, and Barrs was candid that he is unapologetic about rolling out an imperfect system. “I am sorry, but I’m not sorry. This system is going to be — we knew there was going to be bugs to work through this, but you cannot fix things unless you roll it out, and let’s figure out what the bugs are.” Carriers should expect login problems in the near term and should engage anyway. MODUS is the foundation for every fraud-prevention measure that comes after.

Resources remain the binding constraint

FMCSA operates on roughly a billion-dollar budget, half of which flows to states as grants. Roughly 300 federal investigators cover an industry of more than a million motor carriers. Barrs noted, correctly, that the agency could not function without state partners. “If I and our agency did not have the support of our state partners, we’d be in bad shape. They’re just an arm of us in all 50 states.”

Adjusted for inflation, FMCSA’s allocation is down approximately 60% over the past 15 years while the carrier population has roughly doubled. The mismatch is structural and politically uncomfortable. The agency is producing measurable market impact with a fraction of the resources it had in real terms a generation ago. That is a credit to Barrs and his team. It is not a sustainable model.

When I asked whether he’d take more funding if it were offered, Barrs allowed himself a smile. “Of course I’d like to have more. But I want to make sure that we also are being very frugal with our funds. I want to make sure that we are putting our dollars where they need to be spent to make sure that they are all in a safety component that is making meaningful change.”

What this means for the freight market

The freight downturn that began in mid-2022 was driven principally by a 28% capacity expansion that arrived during a demand collapse. That overhang has been the central feature of the market for nearly three years. What we are watching now in NTI.USA and FTI.USA is the unwinding of it — not because demand has surged, but because the enforcement environment is finally pushing non-compliant capacity out of the system.

Barrs’s own framing on the market response was characteristically restrained. “I’m happy the markets are going where they’re going. I always revert back to I have to make sure that they are safe and then let that kind of work itself out, because that’s out — I can’t control a lot of that.”

He went further on the people doing the criticizing on social media. “I see comments like, ‘You’re not making a dent, you’re not doing anything.’ I do not ever want anyone — I’m not sticking my head in the sand and say we don’t have a problem. We need to address all of these issues to try to root out these bad actors.”

Higher insurance minimums, full ELDT reform, the death of ELD self-certification, MODUS at full scale, and a credible enforcement posture on English language proficiency, hours of service and vehicle maintenance — none of these have run to completion. Barrs has two and a half years left.

His closing argument was about narrative. “We can continuously say that we have bad and the people who are listening, people who are looking, will constantly say, ‘Boy, the trucking industry is bad.’ If you constantly say that teachers are bad or cops are bad or doctors are bad — guess what’s going to happen? There’s a lot of celebration that needs to be done in the trucking industry because there’s so many people who are doing a lot of really good things.”

The compliant carriers in this industry have been waiting a long time for a regulator who actually regulates. They finally have one, and the market is voting with its dollars.