David Owen, president of the National Association of Small Trucking Companies (sponsor of Overdrive's Small Fleet Championship), recently wrote the House and Senate transportation committees urging action on the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's safety rating system.
Chief among concerns for NASTC, as Owen put it, is that "out of our more than 10,000 member companies, I dare say at least 40% have never been rated."
For one-truck independents, the percentage unrated is likely much higher than that. How about you? Weigh in via the poll below.
And a question: Whether you're currently rated or not, has it helped or hindered your access to freight? Be in touch directly via email with your story.
In typical years, roughly 4,000 investigations resulted in finalized safety ratings of Satisfactory, Conditional or Unsatisfactory, until those numbers fell off in 2025 when the Trump administration came in.
The pace of ratings over many years has been a drop in the bucket. At a 4K-annual pace, it would take an impossible 268 years to finalize ratings for the more than 1M total registered for-hire motor carriers in FMCSA's system.
Asked about reasons for the 2025 decline, FMCSA noted that carrier ratings numbers are a subset of all manner of enforcement work put in, particularly in this last very active year or so.
An agency spokesperson emphasized action on chameleon carriers and entities without valid principal place of business addresses, likewise all the work cleaning up its training provider and electronic logging device registries.
"The agency has done a lot of work in these areas over the past year," the spokesperson noted.
Yet the safety rating system is back in industry conversation given the Supreme Court's recent ruling on brokers' defense against state civil crash-liability suits. It removed a key defense intermediaries have used when faced with "negligent hiring" suits in state courts.
The ruling, in short, adds urgency to brokers' due diligence around safety vetting of the carriers they work with.
Some owner-operators and small fleets fear what could be coming: more public-data mining and monitoring, safety "scores" based on that mining, intrusive ID checks, and other hallmarks of the "carrier vetting" industry brokers have increasingly turned to in recent years.
[Related: C.H. Robinson 'trimming' carrier base after SCOTUS decision]
Other carriers say bring it on, effectively, encouraging brokers to take a holistic approach to vetting, taking the time to truly get to know their service providers.
TIA member Jennifer Mead, CEO of brokerage S2 International, also part of NASTC's "Best Brokers" referred group for members, felt brokers "do have responsibility to make sure we’re selecting a carrier that is a good carrier, but we should be able to rely on the government for a lot of that information ... You should be able to look at a carrier with Satisfactory status" and feel 100% positive that "I should be able to use them -- from a safety perspective," she said.
That's not exactly the case today.
How the safety rating landscape took shape
The stage was set with the public availability of roadside inspection data through the CSA Safety Measurement System, going back well more than a decade now. (To a lesser degree, too, the SafeStat system before that.)
The initial hope was for the SMS to provide the groundwork for finalized safety ratings based on that data -- that's all proved unachievable at the federal level to date.
Owen in his letter to Congress -- also copied to the Secretary of Transportation and FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs -- reminded legislators of the quandary small carriers and independent owner-operators present for a rating system based on roadside inspections and crash data: not enough inspections, violations or crashes to make definitive safety judgments.
He referenced a conversation with an architect of the SMS system early in its development, who told him the smallest fleets "just aren’t having enough accidents for us to effectively measure.”
NASTC and other groups sued over the use of the "alert" hazard triangle-and-exclamation-point symbol with each SMS category when percentile rankings reached the threshold to prioritize a carrier for an audit. The fear was brokers and shippers, and lawyers of course, would use those symbols like definitive judgments, like an Unsatisfactory safety rating.
The success of the suit is reason the SMS includes official disclaimer language to this day, noting "readers should not draw conclusions about a carrier’s overall safety condition simply based on the data displayed in this system." Absent and Unsat rating or a shutdown order, any carrier "is authorized to operate on the nation’s roadways."
Disclaimer or not, the cat was out of the bag, and trucking is at peak data availability today, with parties to freight movement largely left to their own devices when it comes to making real safety judgments.
Owen spelled out his view of road realities in his letter to Congress. "Many in the broker and shipper communities use SMS data inappropriately," he said, too often concluding legitimate, safe carriers "are not qualified to haul their freight safely."
[Related: FMCSA safety-rating revamp: Truckers caution against use of roadside data, CSA SMS]
The recent story of owner-operator Ernesto Charbonier's lockout from C.H. Robinson's internal load board in the wake of the SCOTUS decision might well underscore the point.
At once, many around trucking place less emphasis on the old rating system when it comes to safety assessment.
Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association Executive Vice President Lewie Pugh, asked about the SCOTUS ruling, felt it "illustrates the need for the federal government to better vet anyone looking to operate in our industry. Barriers of entry for brokers and motor carriers remain too low. We must create a supply chain in which we can trust others to be safe, honest and accountable.”
S2's Jennifer Mead joined David Owen himself in noting appreciation for all the agency's work toward correcting what Administrator Barrs called the old "front door problem." Long-term, results should give brokers more confidence a carrier in the system is a safe bet to begin with, whether they're rated or not.
Owen and NASTC, at once, urged Congress to "exercise oversight of CSA and require FMCSA to prioritize actually issuing safety ratings of carriers, in a timely manner, and at scale."
In NASTC's view, safety rating is "supposed to be job one for FMCSA."
[Related: Owner-ops respond to broker group's freakout over SCOTUS ruling]
