GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy Thursday evening got his first run "on a truck on a highway" in Minnesota-based owner-operator Mike Steinbrink's 2014 Kenworth T660. The Kenworth bore the insignia of CDL Drivers Unlimited, who facilitated the short run to the site of a forum with the candidate -- the Iowa 80 Truck Stop in Walcott, Iowa.
Mere weeks ahead of Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses, and after a bit of a delay, CDLDU leader Lee Schmitt facilitated a conversation with Ramaswamy that dug into regulatory details in a manner seldom seen from presidential candidates.
"The more I learn here," Ramaswamy said, "the more drawn in I am." Regulatory pressures in trucking of the last decades -- from the many changes to the hours of service rules to their automated enforcement in the electronic logging device mandate and the current move to mandate speed limiters -- he viewed as a "microcosm of the kind of issues we face in other sectors in our economy. ... Part of what I’m trying to do is draw attention to a sector of our economy that every other candidate in both parties has ignored."
From a 10,000-foot view, Ramaswamy endorsed the notion that leadership at the Department of Transportation and Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration should be building on lived experience in the working world they're tasked to regulate. Other DOT agencies in the Federal Aviation Administration and Federal Railroad Administration, at least, have respectively a private pilot and an attorney with direct experience of the rail industry at the helm, he noted.
Not so the FMCSA, he said, or DOT itself, which he said "should be led by someone with actual expertise. ... That's where presidents ... have failed" trucking. The federal government needs leaders who won't "turn people into machines" with regulations that limit "the power of discretion and judgment."
Ramaswamy referenced his layman's view of the ELD in Steinbrink's rig, for instance, that the ticking time clock "could cause people to be more likely to drive less safe" as "you’re under the gun" on time, he said, calling the ELD mandate a classic case of someone working behind a desk in a government that is "making the problem it was supposed to solve worse."
Responding to the notion of a speed-limiting device mandate, he emphasized the connection between the two, with ELDs increasing the risks of speeding, and potentially being used to retroactively enforce speed rules during audits, as Schmitt had suggested.
