Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is withholding more than $73 million in federal highway funds from New York.
“I promised the American people I would hold any state leader accountable for failing to keep them safe from unvetted, unqualified foreign drivers. I’m delivering on that promise today by refusing to fund Governor Hochul’s dangerous, anti-American policies,” Duffy said in a statement. “My message to New York’s far left leadership is clear: families must be prioritized on American roads.”
“FMCSA’s mission is safety. That means ensuring that every commercial driver on the road is properly vetted and qualified,” said FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs. “New York’s continued refusal to fix these failures undermines that mission, and we will not allow federal dollars to support a system that falls short of the law.”
The action follows through on Duffy’s warning that New York must comply with rules surrounding non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses (CDL) or face losing millions of dollars in federal highway funding.
A federal audit exposed that New York’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has been illegally issuing CDLs. “The federal audit exposed a shocking 53 percent failure rate in the records sampled, indicating a total collapse in the administration of New York’s CDL program,” a December press release from the Department of Transportation explained. The state’s DMV officials confirmed that the licensing system “programmed to default to an automatic 8-year expiration for non-REAL ID CDLs—intentionally disregarding the expiration of a foreign driver’s lawful presence in the U.S.”
