A trucker's open letter to DOGE's Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk

Mr. Ramaswamy and Mr. Musk,

Congratulations on the victory of the Trump campaign, for which both of you played essential parts, and your subsequent nominations to head the proposed Department of Government Efficiency.

The American federal government in 2024 is a poisoned and bloated carcass that if not corrected will wash ashore on a beach to rot with so much potential wasted and the advancement of humanity itself curtailed.

Why is it that the trucking industry, which is the most critical link in the nation's supply chain, is being allowed to be undermined by foreign actors?

I want to single out Mr. Ramaswamy for additional praise as last year, during the heat of the presidential selection process for the Republican Party, he became the very first candidate in the history of this country to hold a town hall specifically for the people who make up the essential lifeblood of our economy: truckers.

On a cold winter night in Iowa, Mr. Ramaswamy came to the largest truck stop in America and heard our concerns.

In addition to this event, organized by my friends at CDL-Drivers Unlimited, Mr. Ramaswamy has also given public and very high praise to Canada’s Freedom Convoy. This shows that he understands what’s at stake when a wholly illegitimate and crushing bureaucracy pushes an entire country to the brink with no regard for the lives, families, and communities that it affects.

Mr. Ramaswamy also notably beamed in a video to the Mid-America Trucking Show this year, again, courtesy of our friends at CDL-DU.

He is one of a very small handful of politicians to both take an interest in trucking while bypassing the industry's entrenched interests in D.C., best (or maybe worst) represented by the American Trucking Association, to speak directly to drivers and owner-operators.

Given this, I believe you are the best-placed leader to investigate and take action on those parts of the industry and the bureaucrats who regulate it, who are parasitizing themselves on the taxpayers and causing more problems than they are worth.

Though the grift and corporate welfare that exists in the trucking industry is tiny compared to so many others, one fewer cut inches us slowly away from death by a thousand.

In this advice essay, I want to point to a series of issues that face the industry and which of them I believe DOGE would be well-suited to investigate: the waste of taxpayer funds on the industry’s driver retention problem, the misallocation of regulatory effort, and the misplaced focus on environmental concerns derived from trucks themselves.

The 'driver shortage' narrative

I’m sure while you were in Walcott, Iowa, with my colleagues from CDL-DU and so many other truckers you heard criticism about the industry and its claims to a "perpetual shortage of truck drivers."

This is a wholly manufactured concern used to fleece the taxpayer for untold hundreds of millions of dollars every year.

In a coincidence that is surely cosmic and a message from God himself, in the same week that President Trump won a clear-cut mandate to lead this country away from self-immolation, our friends at the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration showed exactly why we need DOGE.

In an announcement on Thursday, November 7, the FMCSA bragged of a tour it was going on during which its members would lavish $140 million in taxpayer dollars on training programs for new truck drivers. At the same time, many carriers with hundreds of trucks across this country were closing up shop, in stark contrast to the claims of President Biden and his sycophants of there being such an awesome economy right now.

Does it not say something that one of the trucking industry’s biggest and highest-regarded publications has a very active section dedicated to nothing but truckers going out of business?

Even if the trucking business were booming, is it the responsibility of taxpayers to foot the bill for carrier training programs? What if I told you that "truck driver training" has become a stealth corporate welfare program that funnels untold millions of taxpayer dollars toward trucking companies that have gotten so used to these taxpayer funds that they will not do anything to reduce their own churn problem?

An academic named Steve Viscelli was recently commissioned by the state of California to see what could be done to ensure that there were enough truckers to keep the agricultural industry there moving. Viscelli’s study found that the taxpayers of California were spending $20 million a year on one training program alone and losing most of those newly trained drivers within a year.

In this same report, soon to be unemployed Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg admits that 300,000 truckers quit every year across America despite the millions of dollars spent on similar training programs.

It is quite clear that throwing money at this problem is not solving it, and it leads to one question. What do we get for all of that money other than a steady flow of underpaid, rookie truckers who tend to be involved in collisions at higher rates than everyone else thus necessitating increases in insurance premiums for all carriers that are sometimes so high that trucking companies are forced to close due to the unaffordability of those premiums?

Why do we tolerate this? Perhaps DOGE can look to cut off funding to trucker training programs and let the free market do its thing. It's long past time for the taxpayers to stop footing the bill for this problem, which won’t be solved as long as "free" money is available, which disincentivizes any solution.

Regulatory misdirection

The FMCSA, which is nominally tasked to properly regulate the trucking industry and which has an annual budget of nearly a billion dollars a year, could use some direction in prioritizing its resources and being far more efficient in cleaning up bad actors in the trucking industry than it currently is.

There are a number of problems in trucking right now that are within the purview of FMCSA to solve, but it seems hell-bent on harassing the industry with onerous regulation instead, leaving the industry open to being abused. This in turn results in value from the American economy being extracted to other countries while putting the motoring public at unnecessary risk.

Allow me to explain.

There are a number of fraudulent scams being run on the trucking industry, many of them involving both foreign entities and entities based in the United States.

Double-brokering

A recent recurring problem is "double-brokering," as part of which one middleman load broker arranges a truck through another load broker either willfully or unknowingly, which is highly illegal.

Under the law, only one broker may be involved in a load arrangement between a shipper and the trucker hauling the load. In a double-brokered situation, not only is an additional hand in the pie, removing value that ought to be going to the trucker who hauled the freight so that he can operate safely and turn a profit, but questions of liability and even more potential fraud arise.

In the most egregious cases, we see situations in which the trucker who hauled the load doesn’t get paid at all.

Estimates put the losses from double-brokering in the tens of millions of dollars. Cumulatively with other forms of freight fraud and outright theft of loads, this problem is estimated to cost the economy a staggering price of $500 million to $700 million annually, and some fraudulent carriers and brokers are so brazen, they are now holding loads for ransom.

What is the FMCSA doing about this?

Not much, as it turns out.

The biggest operation it has orchestrated, which isn’t even in the world of freight, was to crack down on those companies that move households.

Modern-day slavery

Another problem the FMCSA is doing nothing about, that I’m aware of, is investigating the very worrying trend of illegal immigrants being employed as truckers in America, many of them with no command of the English language, many having no CDL or any training whatsoever, and many more often than not being bound to their employers through indentured servitude arrangements.

This is, in essence, a form of modern-day slavery. Over and above this being completely and utterly unethical, illegal immigrants and those other immigrants who are here "legally" through the abuse of existing visa programs, are often paid rates far below prevailing wages, which undercuts the American trucker and thus the wage floor for all other workers.

It is very difficult to get hard numbers on these trends in part because of the self-censoring that many media and labor advocacy organizations engage in because of the "woke" climate that has taken over discussion of nearly any topic in America.

Any frank treatment of the use and abuse of illegal labor in trucking is very difficult to find. When I have brought this up to various mainstream trucking publications and their journalists, I have been dismissed for "searching for a problem" that those I spoke with implied does not to exist.

There are a tiny handful of articles around that have looked into this, specifically from the folks at FreightWaves, a couple of examples of which are found here and here.

Menace behind the wheel

An advocacy organization called American Truckers United has begun to analyze crash data and connect the dots between ever-increasing truck collision numbers on American roads with the use of overseas laborers who, again, are often not trained properly or even licensed at all.

Statistics from the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, a North American wide-group of enforcement officials who conduct annual roadside safety inspection "blitzes," show some worrisome violations that correlate with the behavior of companies that employ illegal immigrants.

In 2024, two of the top five out-of-service violations, for which enforcement officials stop the commercial vehicle from operating, were failure of the driver to produce a CDL and failure of the driver to produce a Medical Certification showing fitness for being behind the wheel.

Some of the problems with employing illegal or other immigrant labor in trucking explicitly to exploit and underpay them have been around for years.

In 2017, USA Today did a major, three-part series on how immigrants from Central America were being abused in drayage operations at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Immigrant truckers were found to be paid starvation wages, if they were paid at all, and in many cases, were barred from going home at the end of their shifts, told to "take a nap" and then keep on trucking.

Why is it that the trucking industry, which is the most critical link in the nation's supply chain, is being allowed to be undermined by foreign actors?

What are the FMCSA and others such as the DOT doing about this?

Horses have left the barn

Nothing. They are too busy focusing on the after-effects of problems created by horses that are already out of the barn.

The FMCSA, if you go by the news feed on its website, spends an incredible amount of time auditing new entrants to the electronic logging device market despite the fact that truck crashes and aggressive driving cases have gone up since the ELD mandate came into effect in 2017.

When asked whether the FMCSA would reconsider the mandate after being shown that it had achieved none of its goals or objectives, former FMCSA head Robin Hutcheson simply said no.

In fact, the FMCSA is now considering expanding the ELD mandate to older trucks that have been exempted, even though there are no studies that show trucks exempted from the mandate are a factor in truck collisions or other safety concerns. The FMCSA is worried about compliance — not material improvement.

I posit to DOGE that the FMCSA, DOT, and other federal agencies tasked with regulating the trucking industry are wasting taxpayer dollars by focusing far too much effort on compliance gimmicks and technological fixes to problems that are very human.

America’s roads are becoming increasingly dangerous because there are far too many drivers on them who have not received adequate training, don’t speak English, or are otherwise employed in the trucking industry illegally.

The evidence is out there, and these agencies ought to be investigating these problems rather than engaging in a rearguard action that wastes time and resources punishing those parts of the industry that are not the problem. At nearly a billion dollars a year, we should be getting far safer roads out of the FMCSA than we currently are.

Truck efficiency, system efficiency

There are many in our society who are concerned about climate change, and for many years now, regulators have sought to reduce various types of emissions into our atmosphere. The trucking industry has come under intense scrutiny in this regard, given how many trucks there are on the road in support of our modern economy.

Since 2007, the EPA has imposed, and continues to impose, ever more stringent emissions control mandates on trucks. Truck engine manufacturers have done their best to develop technologies that meet the requirements of those mandates, but this has not come without significant cost.

Famously, the heavy equipment and engine manufacturer Caterpillar gave up trying to meet the mandates at all and discontinued building truck engines for on-highway use.

Other manufacturers have pressed forward with various technologies, with the most popular being selective catalytic reduction, which helps reduce diesel particulate matter and nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide.

Studies on the economic impact of these mandates are hard to come by, and no studies of or investigations into the impact of illegal labor on trucking have been done.

Society has taken it as a given that any mandate or regulation imposed on us in the name of saving the climate is a moral and unquestionably good, and it is politically dangerous to actually examine the effects of such.

Weighing the costs

Yet the anecdotal evidence from trucking companies and owner-operators about the cost imposed on them by these emissions mandates has been piling up for years; even legal action has been launched in some instances.

The Owner Operators Independent Drivers Association is the largest and oldest trucker advocacy organization in the country. In 2014, it released a white paper examining the impact of EPA mandates on engine manufacturers and on the trucking companies that suffered great losses in time and money from them.

LandLine, the official media outlet of OOIDA, has been following the costs associated with emission control systems mandates for many years and has an immense collection of writings on the subject.

During the recent COVID pandemic, many people first became aware of the term supply chains as those very chains were being stress-tested by the reactions to COVID by governments around the globe.

It showed us that many technologies we rely on for the basic function of our economy are dependent on manufacturers in other parts of the world.

Trucking was not immune to this; specifically, the chips and various other parts that operate these emission control systems became scarce. It was not uncommon to hear about trucks being put out of commission from dysfunctional emissions controls for months at a time due to backlogs of parts.

The emissions racket

In my own experience, the manager of a local truck dealer and service center told me when the propane delivery truck I was driving during COVID was in to have its emission system repaired for the umpteenth time that emission control system service makes up 75% of the business.

Another company I worked for previously had spent $65,000 on emission systems repairs on one truck over the course of 18 months after purchasing it new. The equipment down time accrued by the trucking industry over the last 17 years of these mandates is probably incalculable.

We do not know what the total economic impact of these mandates has been, nor do we employ alternative ways to make our trucking and logistics systems more efficient, mostly because the EPA, and our government in general, are laser-focused on technological solutions to climate change at the exclusion of all other considerations.

We do know, however, that the EPA is a vindictive and spiteful organization that has zero tolerance for those who fail to comply or seek to avoid its costly mandates.

There are numerous examples of the EPA imposing hefty fines on shops and service providers, sometimes millions of dollars, who have disabled or otherwise removed the emissions control hardware and software on modern engines despite the fact engines typically run better and cheaper without them. (And never mind the expensive parts replacements and down time when they eventually break down.)

To add insult to injury, many used trucks in America are sold internationally, especially next door into Mexico and Central America, where those systems are immediately removed from the trucks.

Beside not being subject to similar mandates, the trucking industry in those countries simply does not have the parts and DEF distribution networks or the money to pay for these systems. In the words of Rob Henderson, writer and author of the wildly popular memoir "Troubled," the imposition of very expensive emissions control systems is a "luxury belief."

Wasted capacity

What could the EPA and other agencies be doing to make the trucking industry more efficient rather than wasting government resources in pursuing operators simply trying to make a living in a market where margins are very tight and many companies are going out of business?

Perhaps the reason so many trucks are on the road in the first place is that trucking capacity is often wasted due to problems that are not the fault of truckers but of the customers whom they service.

"Detention" is the industry term for the time that trucks sit waiting to be loaded or unloaded at customer facilities, and it is consistently listed as a top-10 problem in annual surveys by the American Transportation Research Institute, this year making number four among drivers across the board.

MIT FreightLabs has launched studies into the issue of trucking capacity, or rather the woefully inefficient use of it. In 2022, one of the researchers put it rather starkly: "40% of America's trucking capacity is left on the table every day."

Another issue with trucking in America is our very restrictive weight limits. The federal standard of 80,000 pounds gross is one of the lightest in the world. Many states have allowances for longer and heavier trucks within their states, as they understand that trucks doing more work per load means fewer trips and fewer trucks on the road in total.

For comparison, in Canada, with what they call a Super B Train, trucks are longer and allowed to be 140,000 pounds gross weight.

Perhaps the recent bipartisan Infrastructure Act could have contained funding and specification to upgrade our roads to accommodate even slightly heavier trucks, or build double unit yards along certain interstates, as we see already on roads like the New York State Thruway or Ohio Turnpike.

I would submit to DOGE that the United States trucking system is in many ways vastly inefficient. Subsequently, there are more trucks on the road than we need, which contributes to excessive carbon emissions. Rather than tackling these efficiency deficits, the EPA has fallen under the sway of well-connected cronies who want to sell more costly technology to us while assuaging the manufactured guilt of the public about the state of the sky.

In conclusion

The trucking industry in America faces vast challenges — too many to list here. I did not even begin to touch on the looming potential of automated trucks or the oversale of electric vehicles to the public as a solution to slow down climate change.

There are, however, some very simple policy changes that ought to be made that would force the industry to rethink how it does business and be less reliant on government handouts, illegal labor, and a punishing regulatory regime that is chasing problems created by those handouts and use of illegal labor.

The regulatory agencies that oversee all of this are very costly to American taxpayers. They would have less to do, and thus necessitate a lower price tag, if we enacted my above suggestions.

This essay originally appeared on the Autonomous Truck(er)s Substack.