Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy on Friday marked the one-year anniversary of President Trump’s executive order on trucking reform, releasing a tally of enforcement actions that administration officials say have fundamentally overhauled an industry that operated without meaningful federal oversight for years.
In 12 months, the Department of Transportation revoked more than 28,000 illegally issued foreign commercial driver’s licenses, pulled over 20,000 non-English-proficient drivers out of service, shut down thousands of fraudulent CDL training schools, and penalized states that refused to comply with federal law.
“The Trump Administration has hit major milestones in our efforts to rein in the trucking industry, which has been allowed to operate like the Wild, Wild West for far too long,” Duffy said in a statement Friday. “We’ve brought back common-sense rules of the road, including requiring English language proficiency and valid working documents for foreign drivers. When state leaders failed to keep Americans on the road safe, we stepped in and held them accountable, and we’re just getting started.”
The department linked the policy shift to a series of fatal crashes that occurred during the Biden-era influx of illegal aliens into the country’s commercial transportation sector. Among the incidents cited by the administration:
DOT officials noted that the number of fatal crashes involving non-English-proficient drivers spiked sharply during the years of lax enforcement under the previous administration.
Duffy’s department also moved to close what officials called CDL mills, fraudulent training schools that issued licenses to unqualified applicants without completing required safety instruction. Thousands of those schools have been shut down since the order took effect.
In a statement released Friday, Transportation officials described the year’s work as having “closed loopholes allowing unqualified foreign drivers to get licenses to drive big rigs” and held states “accountable for illegally issuing non-domiciled Commercial Driver’s Licenses.”
Trump signed the original executive order directing DOT to begin enforcing English proficiency and cracking down on foreign CDL fraud in April 2025. At the time, Duffy put state transportation departments on formal notice that failure to comply with federal immigration and licensing laws would result in loss of federal transportation funding.
Almost immediately after Trump’s directive took effect, non-compliant truckers began selling their rigs and leaving the road.
California and New York were among the states that drew federal scrutiny for illegally issuing so-called non-domiciled CDLs, licenses granted to drivers who do not actually reside in the state. Both states faced massive funding penalties after the Department of Transportation audited license issuance practices nationwide.
