When Congress passed MAP-21, the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act, the directive to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration was straightforward. Commercial driver training varied too widely across states. Some programs were rigorous. Some were close to nothing. People were dying in preventable crashes because drivers were getting commercial licenses without demonstrating they could actually operate an 80,000-pound vehicle safely. FMCSA was told to fix that with national minimum standards.
The final ELDT rule was published in December 2016. It took effect on February 7, 2022. By the time the industry was done shaping it, the floor Congress ordered had been effectively removed.
THE INDIANA CRASH AND THE SCHOOL THAT DIDN’T EXIST
On February 3, 2026, Bekzhan Beishekeev, 30, a Kyrgyzstan national who entered the United States through the Biden administration’s CBP One application, was driving a commercial truck eastbound on State Route 67 in Jay County, Indiana, when he failed to slow for traffic and swerved into the westbound lane. The van he struck was carrying six people. Four of them died: Henry Eicher, 50; Menno Eicher, 25; Paul Eicher, 19; and Simon Girod, 23. All four were members of the local Amish community.
Beishekeev held a Pennsylvania non-domiciled CDL issued in July 2025. He had been employed by AJ Partners, a carrier connected to the Sam Express and Tutash Express chameleon network. The CDL training school that certified his competency was Aydana Inc., operating as U.S. CDL, incorporated in August 2022 at 524 Continental Road in Hatboro, Pennsylvania.
Aydana Inc. had no presence on the FMCSA Training Provider Registry. It had no presence on Pennsylvania’s list of licensed CDL training providers maintained by the State Board of Private Licensed Schools. It had no website, no Google Business listing, no Yelp listing, and no discernible digital footprint of any kind for an entity incorporated for more than 3 years. The Pennsylvania Department of Education states explicitly that providers on its licensed list are the only training providers in Pennsylvania legally permitted to offer ELDT instruction. PennDOT accepted the certification from this entity and issued a commercial driver’s license.
Three institutional failures, one driver, four dead.
That is what the system produced in a single case. The FMCSA Training Provider Registry currently lists approximately 16,000 providers, down from a peak of more than 7,000 providers removed or flagged in under three months. Secretary Duffy mobilized more than 300 investigators across 50 states for a five-day enforcement sweep in February 2026, conducting 1,426 on-site sting operations. Of those, 448 schools received notices of proposed removal for failing to meet basic federal safety standards. Another 109 voluntarily removed themselves from the registry upon learning investigators were en route. Ninety-seven more remain under active investigation.
Before December 2025, when FMCSA removed nearly 3,000 providers in a single action, the registry had been operating for three years since ELDT took effect, with almost no systematic on-site verification of the schools listed on it. The self-certification model that the ATA celebrated in 2022 meant the registry was only as legitimate as the providers willing to attest to their own compliance.
There are approximately 700,000 active motor carriers in the United States. Roughly four million people hold commercial driver’s licenses. The question the Jay County crash forces is not complicated. If a ghost school with no registry listing, no state license, and no digital presence can produce a CDL that a state agency accepts and a carrier relies on to put a driver on the road, and four people die before the system notices, how many variations of that sequence are currently active across an industry this size?
The enforcement numbers suggest the answer is not small. FMCSA put more than 44 percent of all training providers under scrutiny in a three-month period. More than a hundred schools chose to disappear rather than face a surprise inspection. The CDL the Jay County driver carried was issued four months before the crash. The school that produced it had been incorporated for three years.
The registry was not protecting anyone. It provided the appearance of verification, while the actual verification occurred nowhere.
WHAT ELDT REQUIRES, AND WHAT IT DOES NOT
The Entry-Level Driver Training regulations do not require a minimum number of instructional hours. FMCSA confirmed this directly in its own FAQ documentation, stating that completion of behind-the-wheel training “is based solely on the training instructor’s assessment of each driver trainee’s individual performance.”
The training instructor, whose income depends on moving students through the program, makes the proficiency call. The training provider self-certifies that it meets federal requirements. The training provider self-certifies that the student completed the curriculum. The training provider self-certifies proficiency. FMCSA does not provide training materials, does not endorse specific curricula, does not audit training quality, and does not independently verify proficiency claims. The agency maintains a registry. That is the federal role.
The American Trucking Associations described the absence of minimum hours as a feature when the rule was finalized, noting there were “no minimum training hours required nor new exorbitant costs.” The industry got the appearance of federal oversight with none of the operational substance. What remained after lobbying was a federal registration program attached to a curriculum outline, with self-certification at every checkpoint and every decision that actually matters left to the states.
FIFTY STATES, FIFTY STANDARDS
CDL training oversight does not have one point of failure. It has fifty. Every state sets its own rules for school licensing, instructor qualifications, minimum training hours (if any), testing procedures, and examiner qualifications. The federal framework is the floor, and that floor is a self-certified, zero-minimum-hour structure with no independent verification mechanism.
Some states built real programs on top of that framework. Others did not.
The degradation is measurable over time. A community college driving program that ran 320 hours in 1992, built around Professional Truck Driver Institute standards with manual transmissions and CDL testing conducted by state DOT Motor Carrier Enforcement officers, had been cut to 240 hours by 2017. By 2025, the same institution had reduced the program to 120 hours, three weeks, with the first day and a half in a classroom, automatic transmissions, and third-party examiners. The prerequisite theory portion had moved online and was unmonitored.
That is one of the better programs. Some states have no minimum training hours beyond the ELDT framework, meaning the federal self-certification model is the entire program.
THE CALIFORNIA CASE
California provides a detailed example of how state-level exceptions create fraud pathways.
Under California’s not-for-profit school classification, a school can serve as its own third-party examiner through the employer school framework. The same entity that collects tuition also trains and certifies the student’s competency. The conflict of interest is structural, built into the classification system itself.
California’s DMV corruption scandal involving 20 defendants illustrates what happens downstream from that structure. DMV employees accepted bribes from truck-driving school owners to alter database records and pass applicants who had never completed required testing. DMV employee Kari Scattaglia issued at least 68 fraudulent CDLs, receiving $200 per fraudulent written exam and $500 per fraudulent road test. Lisa Terraciano issued approximately 60 fraudulent licenses per month, totaling at least 148 fraudulent CDLs. Truck driving school owners Jagdish Singh, Jagpal Singh, Parminder Singh, and Tajinder Singh bribed DMV employees to access and alter database records. Undercover agents were told they could pay $1,500 to $9,000 for a Class A CDL.
FMCSA’s 2025 audit found systemic failures persisting in California. Secretary Duffy pulled $160 million in federal funding plus an additional $40 million in October. California filed suit against the Department of Transportation in response. Between June and August 2025, California conducted approximately 34,000 inspections and placed exactly one driver out of service for an English Language Proficiency violation.
THIRD-PARTY EXAMINERS
The third-party examiner model is a structural conflict-of-interest problem. States outsourced CDL testing to reduce costs, creating a system where private contractors authorized to conduct skills tests are paid per exam. Driving schools need their students to pass. The examiner who passes everyone gets more referrals than the examiner who maintains failure standards. The market incentive runs directly against public safety.
In Washington, Skyline CDL School funneled cash bribes averaging $520 to $530 in gold envelopes to independent tester Jason Hodson, who entered passing scores for students who never took exams. Of 877 drivers tested by Hodson, 80% failed when retested legitimately. At least 110 licenses were revoked. The scandal was linked to a fatal crash. When Washington shut down Skyline’s operations, the school continued operating in Oregon.
In Florida in June 2025, two DMV employees in Bay County were arrested for selling licenses to undocumented immigrants without any testing in exchange for cash payments funneled through intermediaries, including a CubaMax franchise location. Bay County Sheriff Tommy Ford described it directly, saying authorities had individuals on the road, possibly operating tractor-trailers who had never demonstrated the basic skills to do so safely. Authorities seized $120,000. Evidence suggested hundreds, possibly more than a thousand, fraudulent licenses had been issued over at least two years.
In Massachusetts, former State Police Sergeant Gary Cederquist ran the CDL Unit from 2019 to 2023, arranging passing scores for at least three dozen applicants regardless of whether they passed or took the test. Text messages recovered by investigators showed Cederquist describing applicants as “horrible,” “brain dead,” and “an idiot” while assigning passing scores. What he received in exchange included a new driveway worth more than $10,000, a snowblower, and large quantities of premium bottled water, coffee, and candy.
These are not isolated incidents. A comprehensive review of DOT Inspector General cases between 2001 and 2025 documented more than 6,000 fraudulent commercial licenses issued across 69 major cases in 20 states, at least 13 deaths directly linked to fraudulent license holders, and convicted fraudsters serving an average of less than two years before disappearing back into society with no national database tracking their whereabouts or preventing reentry into transportation work.
THE FOUNDATIONAL PROBLEM
Approximately 13 states require no behind-the-wheel training for a standard driver’s license. Arkansas requires no driver’s education. Florida requires a four-hour Traffic Law and Substance Abuse Education course. Kentucky requires nothing. A driver in those states can move from no formal training to commercial licensing with minimal demonstrated competency at any level.
The shift to automatic transmissions in commercial equipment compounded the problem. Less than a decade ago, approximately 10 percent of heavy-duty trucks had automatic transmissions. Today, more than 95 percent of new Class 8 trucks feature automatics. That change removed a competency filter that existed precisely because manual transmission operation is technically demanding. Drivers who would not have passed manual transmission requirements are now receiving CDLs for equipment they have limited preparation to handle in the situations where experience actually matters,such as emergency braking, jackknife recovery, and mountain grade management.
WHAT THE REGULATION SHOULD HAVE BEEN
ELDT, as written, is a federal registry attached to a curriculum framework. What it was supposed to be was a functional floor with minimum hours, standardized proficiency assessments that cannot be self-certified by the training provider who profits from the outcome, federal monitoring of training providers through unannounced inspections, and elimination of the third-party testing conflict by requiring CDL testing to be conducted by certified state employees with federal oversight.
The English proficiency requirement has been federal law since the 1930s. Uniform enforcement of that requirement across all states was never built into ELDT. Field assessments vary by inspector and by weigh station, producing inconsistent enforcement of a standard that exists precisely because a driver who cannot read an English road sign or respond to an official inquiry is a documented safety hazard.
FMCSA is currently spending resources maintaining a Training Provider Registry that, by design, cannot ensure training quality. A registry that 3,000-plus providers self-certify into annually does not produce verified competency. Those resources directed toward actual enforcement, provider auditing, fraud investigation, and a CDL fraud conviction database modeled on the Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse would produce measurable safety outcomes. The Clearinghouse, launched in 2020, is queried more than a million times annually and demonstrably prevents drivers with substance violations from state-hopping to evade consequences. No equivalent system exists for fraud convictions.
THE RECORD
The Willis family lost six children in 1994 to a driver with a fraudulently obtained CDL. Adem Salihovic’s 74-vehicle pileup in California killed two people and injured 51. Seven Alabama prison guards died in a crash involving a driver operating under an active Imminent Hazard Order. Three people died on the Florida Turnpike because a driver carrying two illegal CDLs from two different states made an illegal U-turn.
The training and licensing system that produced those drivers was designed to process volume. ELDT did not change that design. It added a federal registry. The fraud operations that were documented before February 2022 continued after that. The third-party examiner schemes that gave rise to the Washington, Florida, and Massachusetts cases all postdate ELDT’s effective date.
Congress authorized a floor. The industry lobbied the floor out of existence. Fifty states filled the void with fifty versions of inadequate oversight. And there is no national system tracking the people convicted of compromising that oversight once they serve their sentences and return to the workforce.
This article draws from and builds upon my previous investigations, including “The Fraud Factory: Corrupt CDL Programs That Put Killers Behind the Wheel” and “How CDL Licensing Standards, Training Schools, and Corrupt Examiners Killed the Trucking Industry,” as well as data provided through Freightwaves and The Tea Substack and my ongoing FMCSA enforcement analysis.
