DOT Secretary Sean Duffy might have already killed the driver shortage with his move to kick 200,000 non-domiciled CDL drivers out of the industry, but the day before Halloween, he actually buried it.
Now, even the American Trucking Associations is backing off its hallmark talking point.
At the 2025 ATA Management Conference & Exhibition in San Diego, Chief Economist Bob Costello sang a notably different tune about the driver shortage, as noted by Overdrive's sister publication Commercial Carrier Journal.
"What we have in the United States is a quality problem around drivers, much more so than an absolute number," said Costello. "It's the quality of the labor. Drug and alcohol testing. Accidents. That is what a ATA is talking about when we talk about this issue."
ATA President Chris Spear also retreated from the organization's previous claims of an 80,000 driver shortfall that would grow to 160,000 by 2030, a number the organization routinely offered and adjusted for many years.
“It’s about qualifications,” said Spear at the conference. “We don’t lack people with CDLs. ... What we lack is the number of qualified drivers who meet our high standards of professionalism and safety. Qualified means you can speak English, read road signs, understand safety rules, and respect our laws. Qualified means you are not abusing alcohol or using drugs. Qualified means you earned your CDL the right way, not through a rubber-stamped process in a state that looks the other way."
ATA's retreat from its driver shortage claims might come as a shock to some, but to many in the industry, it's been dead and cold for a while now.
This year, the notion of a "driver shortage" did not rank in the American Transportation Research Institute’s Top Industry Issues report for the first time in the survey’s 21-year history.
You'll have to forgive the press if the obituary hasn't fully made the rounds yet.
Duffy has already tangled with the driver shortage narrative, when at the press conference announcing the September move to stop renewing CDLs for 200,000 non-domiciled drivers, a reporter asked him about it. Duffy did his best to put to bed the idea of a driver shortage in that response, but in the month since, he's only showed more appetite for purging drivers from the industry.
At a press conference on October 30, Duffy announced plans to withhold funding from California for not getting in line with English language enforcement and the non-domiciled CDL pause, to use Department of Homeland Security law enforcement to arrest and deport non-citizen drivers, and even to "go after" so-called CDL mills and carriers and shippers that hire or work with illegal aliens.
[Related: DOT vows 'serious consequences' for CDL mills and carriers, shippers hiring 'illegal alien' drivers]
Duffy's message was clear: The Trump administration wants hundreds of thousands of non-citizen drivers and non-English speakers gone, and they should get going now.
Once again, a member of the media asked about the driver shortage:
"One of the reasons that so many non-citizens are driving big rigs on American roads is because, as truck driving companies report, there's a shortage of people who are wanting to take these jobs," the reporter said. "So, given that shortfall of American workers to take those jobs, what is the Trump administration doing to skill up those workers to create that domestic labor supply and if you start enforcing these rules strictly? Are you concerned that the absence of non-citizens is going to lead to shortages in truck driving that will then affect supply chains, transportation networks?"
Duffy thanked the reporter for the "fantastic question" but said "I think you have different data than I have."
Duffy then gave a detailed point-by-point refutation of the driver shortage narrative, saying flat out that bad carriers hire bad drivers to haul cheap freight, and absent the non-citizen drivers who might be motivated to haul for less, truck driving can return to its rightful place as a worthy, proud profession for Americans.
Here's his full response:
There's a lot of Americans who want to get behind the wheel of a big rig. These are and have been really great paying jobs. But when you will bring someone in who doesn't have a driver's license, they'll drive that truck for a much lower rate. Or someone who unlawfully got their license, they'll drive that rig for a much lower rate. And so what's happened in the industry is they've driven the prices down. And a lot of companies that have been around for a very long time are now starting to go out of business.
So I do not buy the idea that there's not enough American truck drivers. To the contrary, there are enough American truck drivers to meet the demands that we have in this country. This was concocted in a way to allow people to come into our country to get commercial driver's licenses unlawfully and then get behind the wheel, and I don't think that that's the appropriate approach.
We have a a long history of great American truck drivers who, by the way -- they're almost like our air traffic controllers or our pilots -- they take their jobs very seriously. What they do on American roads, they think is of utmost importance because it's not just their lives, it's the lives of the people around them on our highways and freeways that they're concerned about every single day.
I think you'll see American truck drivers fill the space when we do what's right and take out these unlawful drivers.
And just a side note, never should we compromise safety. Never should we say we should put an unqualified driver in a big rig and an 18-wheeler and set them loose in our roads and think that that's a great solution. You've seen the videos. People die when we do that. That is not the answer.
If you need more drivers, make the case. Tell people how great the industry is, how much you can make in a year by driving a truck, and it will be met with, I think, a number of applicants if we need those new truck drivers to come in.
So I feel very confident that if we're able to take out the unlawful, untrained, non-English-speaking drivers, we will not have an issue on our roadways. We will not have issues with our deliveries. Our products will move, but they'll move safer because we have better drivers who are driving those big rigs who have legal licenses and can actually speak the English language.
When Overdrive last asked ATA about the driver shortage, ATA acknowledged "excess capacity in the market," and that losing 200,000 or more drivers wouldn't hurt.
Overdrive readers and contributors have long argued the "phantom" of the driver shortage belonged in the fiction section with other scary, hard-to-believe stories. ATA didn't exactly lower a coffin, and Duffy didn't explicitly shovel dirt on top, but for now, driver, consider the foe defeated.
That said, a horror movie loves a good sequel.
For now, some analysts predict the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration in trucking could see 614,000 drivers flee the market and rates return to 2021 bonanza levels, and we'll see what the big fleets have to say then about recruiting new talent.
[Related: Chase away the phantoms: There is no shortage of American-made drivers]
