Freightwaves Interview Part 1: Under-enforced regulations, under-insured, and under-capitalized trucking carriers
The Trucking Alliance partnered with Freightwaves for a panel discussion on trucking safety, regulations, and more. In this three-part series, the panel discusses its goals for 2026 and beyond.
The first part of this series focuses on three major structural problems in the trucking industry: regulations are under-enforced, and most companies are under-insured and under-capitalized. With over 90% of motor carriers lacking a federal safety rating, unrated carriers are disproportionately involved in crashes. Additionally, federal minimum insurance requirements ($750,000) haven’t changed since 1980, and low financial barriers allow carriers to start trucking businesses despite not having enough capital to run one.
Solutions proposed by the panel ranged from strengthening enforcement via Level 8 inspections, adopting tools and technology like PrePass and Drivewyze to improve regulatory reforms and enforcement of rules.
Click this link for the full roundtable discussion.
JOHN KINGSTON: Welcome, I’m John Kingston, the Editor-at-Large at FreightWaves. I’m here today with several representatives of the Trucking Alliance, who are laying out a very ambitious agenda on the issue of safety, fraud, and theft here in late 2025 and into 2026. It’s the kind of thing that really touches on so many issues that are so prevalent in the trucking industry today, or ones that have really come to the forefront this year in 2025. As we’re coming to an end of the year, wondering if some of these situations are going to get worse or better in 2026, the Trucking Alliance is leading this charge to try to make it better. We are happy to have them with us today at FreightWaves to discuss their, as I said, very ambitious agenda. I’m going to kick things off by turning things over to Steve Williams. Steve is the co-founder and President of the Trucking Alliance; he’s also the Chairman and CEO of Maverick USA. Steve, welcome to FreightWaves. Why don’t you talk about the Trucking Alliance, what it does, its history, how it got to this point, and kind of sum up what you’re planning on doing with this really forward-looking agenda and list of priorities going into the new year?
STEVE WILLIAMS: Thank you, John. You know, it’s actually a pretty exciting time because we have been working on a lot of very principal, foundational issues for 12 or 13 years. We, in fact, have been successful in getting a lot of those accomplished—whether it be ELDs, the National Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse, getting hair testing recognized as a valid test, or the requirement of electronic braking. Our agenda is obviously all about safety and the safety of our drivers and those that we share the road with. Yet, we realize that all of these decisions and changes that we make have a tremendous impact on those people that are within the industry. The impact that we’re trying to make is a positive one. It takes a strategic vision, one of which I don’t think the industry has had, or it’s subscribed to the wrong one. For context, over my lifetime, the U.S. population has doubled. So, the solutions that we had in the ’50s are not the same solutions that we have in the mid-’20s. So, I think our vision is a strategic vision. It’s based upon real hard evidence. It’s based upon a vision that will, in fact, improve highway safety dramatically. I think we’ve all kind of lost context in our competitive environment here in the U.S. that we collectively are getting behind the rest of the world. I think that some of that starts at grassroots and in regulatory issues, but a lot of it is very foundational.
GREER WOODRUFF: The Trucking Alliance has been around for well over a decade now. As Steve mentioned, we’ve had a lot of success with our priorities in the past. It was just time for us to sit down and kind of re-evaluate where we thought the opportunities were to improve highway safety and security. Some of the issues that are on our priority list today have been on the list for some time. Some of them are new because there are emerging issues that have more recently surfaced that we thought we needed to research, evaluate, carefully consider, and come up with some strategies of how we thought we could address those maybe more recently emerging issues. So, that’s how we arrived at our priority list. We’re committed to pursue those and try to have a positive impact on the industry and on the highways that we share with other motorists.
JOHN KINGSTON: So, in the list of your points in an executive summary that you published, the first three points all start with the same word: “Under”—Under-enforced, Under-insured, and Under-capitalized. I have to say that I was kind of stunned at some of the numbers in there about the number of trucks on the road that you say have no safety rating. The question is, I mean, how big is that number? How are they all out there? How can you manage to stay out there without a safety rating? Let’s talk about what you would like to see done about it.
LANE KIDD: I’ll jump in on that one. It is a surprising statistic. When you look at the numbers that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has released, you quickly see that upwards of 90% of all of the trucking companies operating on the nation’s highways do not have a federal safety rating. That’s bad enough, but layer in over that the fact that those unrated carriers are engaged in 84% of all the serious large truck crashes that involve fatalities and injuries. So in other words, if you do the math on this, a truck operated by an unrated carrier today is nine times more likely to be in a crash than a truck operated by a rated carrier. That’s a significant safety problem that, until recently, I’m not sure the industry has really been that focused on. It’s one of our top safety priorities: that we ask, we work, and we urge DOT to focus on making sure that those unrated carriers have enough inspections—roadside inspections—until they can have a rating. Otherwise, you have shippers, you have logistics companies that are hiring trucking companies to deliver their freight, they look on the website, they see this carrier doesn’t have a rating—do they operate safely or not?
JOHN KINGSTON: When you say rating, you’re talking about a CSA score or some other kind of rating?
BRETT SANT: We’re talking about the carrier safety rating in the current regime. Carriers in theory are supposed to be rated either satisfactory, conditional, or unsatisfactory. The proliferation of new carriers, particularly over the last four or five years—and even longer, to be honest—has resulted in the FMCSA and their partners at the state level just not being able to keep up with the new entrant audits to rate these new carriers as they join. So, there are quite a few carriers who may have anywhere between a few months and several years of operating history who have never been audited or rated. And who, by the way, because of their size, just have not had sufficient amounts of roadside enforcement data collected on them, which do serve as the basis for many of the audit points in a full compliance review. So, the lack of roadside enforcement for those carriers, the lack of a full compliance review or audit of those carriers, has meant by and large that many just operate without adequate enforcement. I think the issue that you originally asked about, the insurance issue, is related. If you think back to when Congress created the Motor Carrier Safety Act in 1980 and deregulated the industry, the idea was that they would establish minimum financial responsibility requirements for all motor carriers. In theory, then, the insurance industry would help regulate those carriers because that financial minimum has remained the same as it was in 1980, which is as low as $750,000. Many of those carriers, particularly the ones we’ll call non-fleet operators—so these are fewer than five or 10 power units—they’re really not underwritten the way you would maybe expect. In fact, if you look at one of the large insurance underwriters who captures about 15 to 20% of the market, their average fleet size is less than two power units. There really is no, beyond rating and surcharging those carriers, there really isn’t an in-depth underwriting that takes place to appraise the risk of that carrier. A lot of it is data-driven, and the data is lacking again because of the lack of roadside enforcement. So, what you have is a situation where hundreds of hundreds of thousands of operators operating well more than a million power units really are not scrutinized either by the FMCSA and their state partners or by the insurance industry when they are underwritten. That’s a real problem.
JOHN KINGSTON: Let’s go back to the first point about the “under-enforced.” Obviously, the big goal is you want more enforcement. What are some of the things you’re recommending to make that happen?
GREER WOODRUFF: Yeah, John, let me jump in on that one if I could. Just for a little bit of context, we are talking about two different things, which is where you were going a moment ago. We have safety ratings, which are satisfactory, conditional, and unsatisfactory. That’s done typically from an on-site compliance review. The likelihood of an enforcement person going to do a compliance review at a driver’s home or a small office with a small number of trucks is really not likely to occur within the enforcement scheme. So then you have roadside inspections as another means of enforcement. We see that many of the carriers that are out there do not have sufficient data to meet the data quality standards to have a CSA Basic score. So that becomes the problem: I don’t have a safety rating, and I don’t have a CSA Basic score and all of the Basics because I haven’t been inspected at roadside enough to generate the score. What we would like to see happen is we are in favor of what’s called a Level 8 Inspection, where the truck can communicate information—including hours of service and other information—as they approach a weigh station. We can provide that data electronically, and the inspection station can either ask us to pull in or ask our driver to bypass that station. We are piloting that with many of our Alliance carriers with FMCSA, and we’re seeing good results with that. So, we would like to see that advance. We would like to see Level 8 Inspections established. We would like to seek a “clean inspection” credit given for carriers that are bypassed that have exchanged this information, and that information is showing compliance. That could free up the resources at the inspection stations to pull in drivers who have insufficient data or who do not have a CSA Basic score using the ISS [Inspection Selection System] by recommending that those drivers be pulled in. We should pull them in until they have sufficient data in which to generate a Basic score. So those are a couple of changes we could see with enforcement that would help ensure that more of the carriers are given a good look.
JOHN KINGSTON: How complicated and expensive is the technology to make that happen? You say you’ve been working a trial with FMCSA and you like the results. Let’s say everybody says, “Okay, the technology works, it’s great.” How much are we talking about per truck versus investment that has to be made on the FMCSA side or just on the safety side in general?
GREER WOODRUFF: It’s really not that expensive. I don’t want to get into specific dollars, but you’re talking about PrePass and Drivewyze, which many trucks and drivers have on them today. I’m sure there could be new entrants into that, but those are the systems used today to communicate either with a transponder or with just a geo-fenced location and communication protocols to the roadside inspector. So those exist today. They’re on many trucks. They’re available to small truckers or independent operators that might want to use those on a smartphone or an ELD-type device. So they are available to anybody in the industry that wants to subscribe to that and then take advantage of the opportunity to participate in the Level 8 Inspections.
JOHN KINGSTON: Right. So this is not… FMCSA is not set up to do this with everybody now that you’re doing a pilot program, but presumably you’d like to see it get to the point where FMCSA announces you can do this.
GREER WOODRUFF: We would like that. We would like to have criteria established to where we could get some credit when our stuff’s in order and we’re given the clearance to bypass. Because we just bypassed, we don’t get the clean credit, which is part of the CSA score. We need those clean inspections in the denominator for us to have an accurately calculated score.
JOHN KINGSTON: Okay, let’s go on to the second point we started to touch on about “under-insured.” You talked about the minimum requirement being $750,000. It’s been that way for like 45 years. I know that New Jersey raised it to 1.5 million about a year ago with no apparent crisis in the amount of available supply or amount of capacity. What are the chances of this happening? This is a Congress that hasn’t raised a federal gasoline tax since the early ’90s. It doesn’t seem to like to want to raise anything. Is this possible? Do you see this happening?
BRETT SANT: Well, we certainly think it’s possible. But you’re right, it’s not something Congress has been wanting to really get after. But we do think—Lane, you can correct me if I’m wrong—but we do think that the FMCSA has the existing authority without Congress’s action to increase those minimum requirements. You know, we are actively working to provide the data to the FMCSA to help them assess that issue, determine how they might increase those minimums, and to what extent. But if you look at the industry structurally, there are a couple of reasons why this is important. Number one, as I pointed out earlier, we think that it will help encourage insurance companies to properly underwrite these carriers. When you have a million-dollar limit, the level of underwriting kind of reflects that exposure on a per-carrier basis. So that needs to be increased just to encourage more extensive, meaningful underwriting of these carriers. The other factor, though, that we have to understand is these limits create an insurance marketplace that is really untenable for everybody. The fact of the matter is, if you look at any serious injury today—something that would be paraplegia or a serious traumatic brain injury—the minimum limit today is just not enough to provide for the medical care, let alone any of the other damages that are involved for someone who is injured in such an accident. So you have situations where there’s litigation, juries are awarding significant damages, and then those damages really aren’t compensated because the assets aren’t there and the insurance isn’t there to adequately cover those damages. However, the insurance companies… you know, the cost of those claims, the cost of defending those claims, settling those claims is increased. Those costs are not properly allocated among the risk pool. If we properly established limits that would ensure that injury victims are properly compensated, and those costs were allocated properly across the risk pool, you’d have a much healthier environment for motor carriers to buy insurance. It would be a much more stable environment for motor carriers to buy insurance, and you would ensure that victims are properly compensated. Right now, we’re really not accomplishing either goal.
JOHN KINGSTON: All right, let’s talk about your third point: “under-capitalized.” In your summary of your views, where you’ve identified the issue, you say low financial barriers to entry effectively create trucking operations that are insolvent and unsafe on their first day of operation. As we know, barriers to entry in trucking have always been very low. You study industries about who has high barriers to entry—like pharmaceuticals have always been one with the highest barriers to entry. Transportation’s always been pretty low. It’s even not that big to start an airline—that sounds crazy. So you can imagine what it’s like to try to start a trucking company. How would you like to see those barriers… it’s not so much that you want to see the barriers to entry rise, but you want to see that that pathway to entry is sufficiently capitalized. How do you make that happen?
LANE KIDD: Well, if you look at when Congress first deregulated the industry back in 1980, you must assume the Congress had some wisdom when they did that because it was generally supported by the industry. On the other hand, Congress wanted to ensure that the trucking companies that did enter the industry would do so safely and would have the capital to properly maintain and operate their equipment. So they arrived at $750,000 in 1980, which was a considerable amount of money in 1980. In fact, that would equate with inflation to about $2 million today. Well, obviously, a trucking company is not required to have that kind of financial worth to start a trucking company today. You can start one for about $20,000 if you want to borrow enough. That fact of a trucking company being insolvent on the first day of operation was, in fact, the conclusion of a study that the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) did last year. We have a situation where anyone with the ability to put a sign on the side of a truck can be in the trucking business the following day. In any industry that operates in the public sector, where it is putting the public at risk, it should be adequately financed, should be adequately insured, and should be adequately trained in maintaining their equipment. So to do that, the first step would be for the FMCSA to propose an increase in the minimum insurance required to start one. Today that would be about 2.9, some would say 3 million. If you adjust it for medical inflation, it would be about 3.6 million. That in itself would probably preclude many people who should not be in the trucking industry to begin with from even starting, and we could rid ourselves of any of the safety issues.
JOHN KINGSTON: So the under-insurance and the under-capitalized issues are pretty linked here. Requiring more insurance really is the way to get better-capitalized companies into the business. Yes? Okay, absolutely. All right, now your fourth point is… it’s throwing out a big giant net: “systemic fraud.” You know, fraud is all the talk in the industry. I have to say, as a guy from the North, my generation who’s watched Goodfellas 57,000 times, knowing that part of the way the crooks made money back then was to steal trucks… the fact that it seems to have just exploded this year for a crime that’s been around for a long time—not just this year but in recent years—is really notable. So what are some of the biggest ones, and what do you think are the solutions that government can pursue?
GREER WOODRUFF: Yeah, let me mention a couple at least. Someone else may want to chime in. But you know, one of the things that we saw occur during COVID was… you saw this proliferation prior to COVID of electronic or digital freight matching and digital load boards that arose. You wanted to have low friction, you wanted to make it easy for loads to be posted and easy for carriers to be onboarded and come select those loads. That made them susceptible to cargo theft. That combined with FMCSA’s carrier credentialing process—which is undergoing some modernization now, which is welcome—but it has been easy for foreign actors to come onto load boards, take one of those loads, post it on another load board, hire a legitimate carrier and driver to pick that load up, and redirect that load in transit to another delivery location. That’s a warehouse that’s been leased by the thieves; the load’s unloaded, and another legitimate carrier comes and picks it up at that warehouse and moves it to another location. So we’ve seen that occur. There’s been social engineering to get drivers to give their password to FMCSA’s SAFER site. They go in, change the email address and the phone number, and when a broker calls to verify that they’ve accepted the load, you’re calling the thief. They can also social engineer to get their passwords to get into the load boards offered by brokers. So there’s kind of this web of different avenues that can be exploited with the digital freight matching boards and with FMCSA’s credentialing for carriers that has become problematic. That’s led to a lot of cargo theft. It’s led to a lot of carriers hauling loads for which they do not get paid because they thought they were pulling a load for a legitimate broker and they were not. So some of the things that we feel like would be helpful with that is we do applaud the work of FMCSA to tighten up and modernize their credentialing system that’s in place for new entrants now. That will be applied to the full carrier population in 2026. We think that’s going to go a long way in really authenticating the representative of the company and then ensuring that before anybody can get access to their FMCSA data site and make any changes, that it has to be an authorized, verified person.
JOHN KINGSTON: So you think there’s a government solution that’s ready to go and you want to see how this plays out?
GREER WOODRUFF: That’s correct. We believe there’s some opportunities there that will cut down on this scam that’s going on. So we’re very hopeful from what we have seen so far that we’re going to have a good solution there.
JOHN KINGSTON: Does your organization, though, also reach out to the load boards to try to have them amend their ways where you think it might be helpful?
GREER WOODRUFF: We do. We communicate, you know, where we see the weaknesses in the system. We thoroughly investigate these with our security departments. We have tons of intelligence that we can discover when we’re investigating these types of thefts. Those provide insights into: how do we tighten up our own systems? How do we cover up or make up for some of those areas that have been exploited? We communicate those with the FBI, other law enforcement, the load boards, and others. So there’s been an effort really… we saw a proliferation of these thefts in 2023. We’ve seen a decline in those and really a return more to straight cargo thefts, which is just stealing a load that’s at rest somewhere. We’ve seen a shift back to that more recently, but there’s still some work that we can do to tighten this up and reduce the fraud that’s taking place.