WASHINGTON — Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Friday that all commercial truck driver license tests in the United States will now be administered exclusively in English, ending state policies that allowed big-rig operators to take exams in foreign languages.
“It’s English only. You take the test in English. You can’t speak English? You can’t read English? You’re not going to do well in the test, because every test is going to be required to be given in English,” Duffy said.
The order comes after a string of fatal crashes involving illegal immigrants behind the wheel of 18-wheelers. Last August, an illegal immigrant driving a commercial semi on the Florida Turnpike caused a deadly wreck. Despite holding CDLs issued by Washington and California, the driver answered just 2 of 12 questions correctly on an English proficiency exam and identified only 1 of 4 road signs.
Then last week, another illegal immigrant with a CDL swerved into a van in Indiana and killed four people.
Duffy has made trucking safety and CDL reform a centerpiece of his time running the Department of Transportation. Friday’s announcement goes beyond the language requirement. The DOT will also modernize the trucking registration system, crack down on carrier fraud, and tighten driver safety regulations across the board.
The numbers tell a grim story. Large truck crashes climbed 43% over the decade ending in 2023, according to the National Safety Council. In most of those fatal wrecks, roughly 70% of the people killed were in the smaller vehicle, not the truck.
“It’s been allowed to rot, and no one has paid attention to it for decades,” Duffy said of the trucking regulatory system. “Once you start to pay attention, you see that all these bad things have been happening, and the consequence of that is that Americans get hurt when we get on the road.”
Duffy framed the policy as common sense, not partisan.
“Do you want well-trained, well-qualified drivers behind the wheel of a big rig driving on American roads? It’s very simple. I think the answer is, every single American, no matter what your political stripes are, that’s exactly what you want,” he said.
Several states had previously allowed CDL exams in Spanish, Mandarin, and other languages. Critics of those policies argued for years that road signs, emergency communications, and weigh station instructions are overwhelmingly in English, making language comprehension a baseline safety issue.
The DOT is also targeting so-called “sham schools,” trucking training operations that rubber-stamp credentials for drivers who lack basic qualifications. Federal investigators linked one such school to the Indiana crash that killed four.
For the families who lost loved ones on the Florida Turnpike and on that Indiana highway, the announcement is years overdue. For the trucking industry, it signals a new era of federal oversight after what Duffy called decades of neglect.
