Trucking Legislator Rankings. 79 Bills, 3 Laws.

79 bills. Three laws.

Start with the output of the whole machine. Over two Congresses, nearly four years, the United States Congress introduced 79 bills touching trucking. Three became law.

Two of the three are worthy but modest CDL housekeeping measures: the Veteran Improvement Commercial Driver License Act, easing the path for veterans to get their CDLs, and the Strengthening the Commercial Driver’s License Information System Act, a data-plumbing upgrade to the system that states use to share driver records. Good bills. None puts an inspector on a ramp or a dangerous carrier out of business.

The third is the one that tells you where the energy actually went: a Congressional Review Act resolution striking down California’s Advanced Clean Trucks rules. Whatever you think of California’s emissions mandates, and plenty of drivers cheered that repeal, including me, notice what it means. The single most consequential piece of trucking legislation enacted by this Congress was a deregulation. In four years, Congress did not pass one bill that added enforcement capacity, funded inspections, or tightened carrier oversight. Not a single one.

The 76 that didn’t pass? Sixty-nine died the same week they were born, were referred to a committee, and never touched again. Five fought their way through committee, got reported to the House calendar, and died sitting on it. Two of those are bills this industry has spent years asking for.

The Motor Carrier Safety Selection Standard Act would have created a national standard for vetting carriers before hiring them; the question the Supreme Court just made urgent for every broker in America in Montgomery v. Caribe. Reported out of committee. Placed on the calendar. Died. The Truck Parking Safety Improvement Act, the top quality-of-life ask of nearly every driver survey ever taken. Reported out. Placed on the calendar. Died. The system worked exactly up to the point of mattering, then stopped. So we should ask why.

The workhorses

Not many go-getter workhorses among the legislators. Why? Well, because they’re consumer politicians that you and I continuously feed regardless of what they do or fail to do. 79 bills didn’t sponsor themselves, and the people doing the work aren’t mostly the ones you’d guess.

In the House, the heaviest lifters over two Congresses are Rep. Tracey Mann of Kansas with 12 trucking bills carrying his name, Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas, himself a former sheriff whose district sits on the Houston freight corridor, with 11, Rep. Rudy Yakym of Indiana with 10, and Rep. Chris Pappas of New Hampshire, the leading Democrat, with 9. On the Senate side, Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska stands out as the chamber’s most prolific author of trucking legislation, with Wyoming’s Cynthia Lummis and Michigan’s Gary Peters among the most active. Note the geography: Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Indiana, New Hampshire. Freight-corridor and agricultural states, mostly, whose members live with trucking whether they chose the issue or not.

Give the workhorses their due but what did all that work produce? Mann’s 12 bills, Nehls’ 11, Fischer’s portfolio, nearly all of it is sitting in the same subcommittee graveyard as Duffy’s four bills from a decade ago. Effort is not output. Which brings us to the people who control output.

The chairman’s zero

The House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure owns trucking. Every one of those 79 bills that touched the House passed through its jurisdiction. Its chairman is Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri.

Number of trucking bills Sam Graves has put his name on across the past two Congresses: zero. The committee’s top Democrat, ranking member Rick Larsen of Washington: zero. The two most powerful people in the House on trucking policy, with decades of combined service on the committee, did not sponsor or cosponsor a single one of the 79.

To be fair. Chairmen traditionally don’t cosponsor. A chairman’s power is the gavel, not the signature; he decides what gets a markup, and several of the bills that made it to the calendar got there because Graves’ committee moved them. Judged as a traffic cop, Graves let some traffic through. Hold the two facts side by side because the loudest year of federal trucking enforcement politics in memory, conducted entirely by the executive branch, happened while the chairman and ranking member of the committee that could actually legislate on it signed their names to nothing, and the two bills the industry wanted most died on a calendar the majority controls. Down at the subcommittee level, the picture is only slightly better: Highways and Transit chairman David Rouzer has 4, and ranking member Eleanor Holmes Norton has 2, and Norton, as the delegate from the District of Columbia, doesn’t even hold a floor vote.

The alignment table: laws versus graves

Yesterday’s enforcement data meets today’s legislative data. For every state: how many of its House members put their names on any trucking bill, how many truck crash deaths the state suffered in fiscal 2025, and how its enforcement operations perform. The question is alignment. Do the places bearing the burden produce the legislators doing the work?

Sometimes, yes. Texas is the bleakest column in the crash data, 21,006 crashes and 323 deaths in fiscal 2025, and Texas is also the most legislatively active delegation in the country: 21 of its 38 House members put their name on trucking legislation, 60 sponsorships in all, plus Nehls near the top of the individual table. Texas shows up. Whether Texas’s bills address Texas’s problems is a fair follow-up, but nobody can say the delegation ignored the issue.

Then there’s my home (embarrassment), I mean state. Virginia lost 104 people to truck crashes in fiscal 2025. Yesterday’s piece showed Virginia running the most expensive inspections among big states, $424 apiece, and one of the thinnest programs, 26,259 inspections all year. Put those together, and Virginia has the worst enforcement coverage ratio in America: nearly one crash on its books for every five inspections it performs. California, for comparison, runs 45 inspections per crash. Virginia’s legislative response to being the most under-inspected freight state in the nation? Sixteen sponsorships from a delegation of eleven, none of them among the House leaders. 104 funerals, the country’s thinnest inspection coverage, and a delegation in the legislative middle of the pack. If the alignment table has a face, it’s Virginia’s.

Georgia runs it close: 188 deaths, the second-worst coverage ratio at one crash per seven inspections, middling activity. At the far end sits Hawaii, the only state in the Union whose entire congressional delegation, House and Senate, put their name on zero trucking bills across two Congresses. Fifteen truck crash deaths in fiscal 2025 and not one signature. Hawaii’s freight profile is genuinely unusual, an island economy with no interstate trucking in the mainland sense, so I’ll say it plainly rather than imply otherwise: Hawaii’s zero is the most explainable zero available. It is still a zero, and Hawaiians still buried fifteen people.

Ledger taken as a whole

Read the whole table, and a pattern emerges: legislative attention tracks freight geography; corridor and agricultural states produce the active members, which makes sense, but it does not track the burden. The states where the crash-to-inspection math is most broken, Virginia, Georgia, the coverage-gap states from yesterday’s rankings, are legislatively unremarkable. The enforcement war consuming the industry, ELP, licensing, and funding withholdings, is being fought entirely by the executive branch, while the legislative branch produced two CDL housekeeping laws and a deregulation in four years. The people with the most formal power over trucking law signed the least.

That’s the answer Duffy’s record opened. When the people demanding enforcement held the pen across two Congresses, this is what they did with it: 79 attempts, three laws, none of them enforcement, and the bills that would have mattered most died on a calendar. The Secretary’s four-bill congressional record is the pattern, and he’s now the most aggressive enforcement executive in the program’s history precisely because the enforcement lever doesn’t require Congress.

How was this built?

The numbers come from the government’s own records, assembled this week. Every bill in the 118th and 119th Congress, 36,608 in total, was screened against a tight set of trucking terms, motor carrier, CDL, hours of service, FMCSA, and the like, yielding the 79. Tight means conservative: a broad net catches highway bills that mention trucks in passing; this one catches bills about trucking, so if anything, the 79 overstates focus rather than understating it. Sponsorship and cosponsorship for all 79 came from the Congress.gov API, committee assignments from the Congress-legislators public dataset, and Secretary Duffy’s full nine-year record, all 820 bills, from his member file. Crash and enforcement figures are the same audited dataset as yesterday’s piece: deduplicated federal crash records and 2.9 million fiscal 2025 inspections.

Two limits. This ledger counts names on bills, not votes; a member can vote for every trucking measure that reaches the floor and never cosponsor one, though note that almost nothing reached the floor for a vote. Sponsorship counts measure attention, not quality; one good bill outweighs ten messaging bills, which is why the piece names the bills and not just the tallies.

What’s next

This is part two of three. Yesterday: what the enforcement dollar buys. Today: what the legislative pen produced. Part three follows the money, the campaign contributions, the PACs, the lobbying disclosures, and who testified for what, joined to these same names, because the last question the ledger can answer is the oldest one: whether the signatures follow the districts or the donors.

The pen has been mostly idle for four years. Next, we find out who’s been holding the hand that holds it.