The U.S. Postal Service announced this week that it will begin phasing out non-domiciled commercial driver’s license holders from its contractor network, requiring trucking providers to either thoroughly vet these drivers through the Postal Inspection Service or stop using them entirely. The move aligns with the Trump administration’s aggressive crackdown on immigrant drivers, but if you think this is just about immigration policy, you haven’t been paying attention to a decade of contractor scandals that have left bodies on American highways.
“The safety of our employees, our customers, and the American public is of the utmost concern to the Postal Service,” said Board of Governors Chairwoman Amber McReynolds in Monday’s announcement. “We have decided to phase out any use of non-domiciled Commercial Driver’s License operators who have not been thoroughly vetted by the Postal Inspection Service.”
The announcement came just days after USPS’s first attempt at implementing a similar ban collapsed spectacularly. In late October, the Postal Service tried to stop loading contractors using non-domiciled CDL drivers, and facilities across the network immediately ground to a halt. Pete Routsolias, USPS SVP of Logistics, told suppliers on a call that “we didn’t understand the magnitude of how many people were using non-domiciled CDLs, and quite honestly, the amount of omits was astronomical.” The policy was reversed within days.
This time, USPS is taking a phased approach. The underlying reality remains: the Postal Service moves 55,000 truckloads daily, nearly 2 billion miles per year, and a significant percentage of that capacity is now operating in legal limbo.
How USPS Got Here
To understand why USPS is suddenly taking driver vetting seriously, you have to understand how little vetting it was doing before. And there’s no better illustration than Beam Brothers Trucking.
Beam Brothers, based in Mount Crawford, Virginia, was one of the largest mail contractors in the country, operating across 17 states and serving nearly every major city east of the Mississippi. Over a decade, USPS paid them more than $500 million. They were, by every measure, a critical logistics partner.
They were also running one of the most brazen safety fraud operations in trucking history.
From 1999 to 2017, company leadership created routes that were physically impossible to complete legally. Drivers were instructed to falsify their records of duty status and time sheets. According to federal prosecutors, drivers became so fatigued that they could barely stay awake behind the wheel. On multiple occasions, Beam Brothers drivers nearly caused crashes when they momentarily fell asleep on public highways. One driver testified that he was given methamphetamine by colleagues to stay awake, and after three months of drug use, he could no longer physically operate the truck and had to call for medical rescue.
In 2017, a federal grand jury issued a 126-count indictment against CEO Gerald Beam, Vice President Garland Beam, Operations Manager Shaun Beam, and CFO Nickolas Kozel. The charges included conspiracy, falsifying records, wire fraud, and violations of the Service Contract Act. The government was seeking $40 million in judgments.
What happened next tells you everything you need to know about accountability in federal contracting. All four executives pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor count of conspiring to violate highway safety regulations, essentially, an hours-of-service violation. No prison time. Gerald and Garland Beam were sentenced to six months of home confinement. Shaun Beam and Kozel each got three months. The company paid $2 million in forfeitures and $1 million in restitution to the drivers they’d defrauded.
Eagle Express Lines acquired Beam Brothers’ contracts. The mail kept moving. And USPS learned nothing.
The Body Count
A Wall Street Journal investigation in 2023 revealed something that should have been front-page news for weeks: USPS contractors had been involved in at least 68 fatal crashes that killed 79 people over a three-year period, and the Postal Service wasn’t even tracking it.
The agency that spends $5 billion annually on trucking contracts had no reporting mechanism requiring contractors to notify them when someone died. “They’re not even taking the time to find out,” Zach Cahalan, executive director of the Truck Safety Coalition, told the Journal.
The investigation found that 39 percent of trucking companies hauling U.S. mail violated hours-of-service rules at rates that triggered DOT red flags, compared to 13 percent of for-hire trucking firms generally. Nearly 50 long-haul mail contractors had safety records so poor that DOT had placed them on probation.
USPS kept hiring them anyway. The Postal Service’s contracting rules only required that trucking companies have a DOT safety rating better than “unsatisfactory”, meaning “conditional,” which is essentially probation, was good enough to win federal business. Most private shippers won’t touch conditional-rated carriers. USPS made them preferred vendors.
Consider Caminantes Trucking. In June 2022, one of their drivers, distracted and lacking a valid commercial license, slammed into a passenger vehicle on I-25 near Denver. Five people died, including a baby. Federal records showed it was the 16th time a Caminantes driver had been caught without proper credentials. Six people had died in crashes involving Caminantes trucks in the previous two years. USPS finally terminated the contract, but only after a local TV investigation made the connection public.
A 2024 OIG audit found that 43 different USPS contractors were involved in at least 373 crashes between 2018 and 2022, resulting in 89 deaths. The audit also found that the Postal Service “did not always know who was authorized to transport the mail” and “did not track contractor accidents and fatalities.”
This is the context in which USPS is now announcing it will phase out non-domiciled CDL drivers. They’re not doing this because they suddenly discovered the importance of driver vetting. They’re doing this because they’ve been publicly embarrassed into it, first by years of fatal crash investigations, and now by a Trump administration that has made non-domiciled CDLs a political flashpoint.
Secretary Duffy’s DOT and The Regulatory Hammer
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has made non-domiciled CDLs the centerpiece of his safety agenda, and whatever you think of the politics, his agency has uncovered genuine compliance failures that predate this administration.
In September 2025, FMCSA issued an emergency interim final rule that immediately restricted eligibility for non-domiciled CDLs. The rule requires employment-based visas and mandatory federal immigration status verification through the SAVE system. Work permits alone no longer qualify. States must pause issuance until they can demonstrate compliance. All renewals must happen in person.
Duffy didn’t mince words. “This is absolutely 100 percent broken,” he said of the licensing system for non-citizens. “This is a national emergency that requires action right now.”
FMCSA’s nationwide audit found systemic non-compliance across multiple states, with California emerging as the worst offender. More than 25 percent of non-domiciled CDLs sampled in California were improperly issued. In one case, a Brazilian driver received credentials allowing him to operate passenger and school buses, valid for months after his legal presence authorization had expired.
The agency identified at least five fatal crashes involving non-domiciled CDL holders since January 2025, including the Florida Turnpike U-turn crash, a Terrell, Texas, sleeping driver incident, and an I-35 crash involving a driver on depressants. “At least two of these drivers were improperly issued a CDL,” according to FMCSA’s rulemaking.
California has been fighting back. The DMV delayed cancellation of approximately 17,000 non-domiciled CDLs, prompting Duffy to threaten pulling $160 million in federal highway funding. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an administrative stay on the emergency rule in November, freezing implementation while legal challenges proceed.
The court stay only addresses the new restrictions on asylum seekers and certain visa categories. It doesn’t resolve the pre-existing compliance failures FMCSA documented, CDLs issued years beyond drivers’ lawful presence authorization, and licenses granted to Mexican nationals are prohibited from holding non-domiciled CDLs under existing reciprocity agreements. Those were already illegal under rules that existed before Trump took office.
The Capacity Question
FMCSA estimates that approximately 200,000 non-domiciled CDLs have been issued since the program expanded in 2019. The agency anticipates these drivers will exit the market within approximately two years as credentials come up for renewal.
That’s a staggering amount of capacity to remove from an already tight market. USPS’s October enforcement attempt proved just how dependent some carriers have become on non-domiciled drivers. When facilities started refusing to load trucks, the operational impact was immediate and severe.
“We don’t need non-domiciled CDL drivers to make sure our goods flow through the country,” Secretary Duffy said when asked about the driver shortage. That’s true as a policy matter. It’s less true as an operational reality for carriers who’ve built their business models around cheaper labor.
Todd Spencer, President of the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association, put it bluntly: “The days of exploiting cheap labor on the basis of false ‘driver shortage’ claims are over.” OOIDA has long argued that the driver shortage is a wage shortage, that carriers claiming they can’t find drivers are really complaining that they can’t find drivers willing to work for what they’re paying.
The proliferation of non-domiciled CDLs has been identified as a major contributor to the ongoing freight recession. Over 200,000 new drivers entering the market since 2019 created capacity that depressed rates and extended the downturn beyond what fundamentals would suggest. Removing that capacity, combined with enforcement of English proficiency requirements and other regulatory pressure, could significantly tighten the market.
“FMCSA anticipates that the market will respond to this change in capacity as it has in the past, with rates adjusting and drivers and carriers entering the market where needed,” the agency’s rulemaking states. Translation: rates are going up, and carriers who’ve been undercutting the market with questionably licensed drivers are going to feel it.
What It Means for USPS Contractors
USPS holds approximately 4,600 trucking contracts. The agency hasn’t specified a timeline for phasing out non-domiciled drivers, and a spokesperson declined to say how the vetting process would work or how many contractors would be affected.
Contractors using non-domiciled CDL holders will either need to run those drivers through Postal Inspection Service vetting, a process that doesn’t currently exist at scale, or replace them. Given that USPS’s first attempt at enforcement collapsed within days, expect a long runway before any meaningful implementation.
For carriers operating on the USPS network, the practical advice is straightforward: document everything about your drivers’ credentials, start building contingency capacity now, and assume vetting requirements will only become more stringent over time. The combination of DOT regulatory pressure and USPS policy alignment means the window for operating with marginal documentation is closing.
For the broader industry, the USPS announcement is a signal of where federal procurement is heading. The days of lowest-bidder-wins contracting without meaningful safety oversight are ending, not because agencies suddenly developed a conscience, but because the body count became impossible to ignore and the political winds shifted.
There’s a temptation to view this entire controversy through a partisan lens, the Trump administration targeting immigrants, sanctuary states resisting, etc. That framing obscures what’s actually happening.
USPS contractor oversight has been catastrophically broken for at least a decade. Beam Brothers operated a drug-fueled fatigue scheme for nearly 20 years. Caminantes put unlicensed drivers behind the wheel 16 times before killing a family. Dozens of carriers with conditional safety ratings continue hauling mail. The agency didn’t track deaths. It still doesn’t properly verify who’s authorized to transport its freight.
The non-domiciled CDL issue is real, and states did abuse the program. California’s own DMV acknowledged it doesn’t track how many CDLs it issues to non-citizens. FMCSA found that one in four sampled California credentials were improperly issued under rules that existed before the emergency order. That’s not Trump administration overreach, that’s a genuine regulatory failure.
Whether the administration’s emergency rule survives court challenge remains to be seen. Whether it’s being implemented in a manner that’s genuinely about safety versus political theater is a legitimate debate. But the underlying problems, contractor fraud, inadequate vetting, lax enforcement, preventable deaths, those aren’t partisan inventions. Those are documented facts that should concern anyone who shares the road with an 80,000-pound truck.
The Postal Service just completed what it called “an extremely safe and efficient peak season.” Maybe so, but 79 people killed in contractor crashes over three years suggests their definition of “safe” needs work. If it takes political pressure to force accountability, so be it.
The freight keeps moving. The question is whether anyone driving it should be behind the wheel.
