Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration boss Derek Barrs recently announced a major change to the very logic behind lots of important trucking regulation: Self-certification for regulated service providers is going away.
Barrs, speaking to a crowd at the Transportation Club of Jacksonville, painted self-certification as a bogeyman FMCSA can't banish fast enough. He said the agency will "work toward a regulatory process" to do away with "anything that has to do with self-certification at FMCSA."
ELD vendors, medical examiners and CDL-training providers all "self-certify" that they're in line with federal regs, provide some minimal documentation, and get placed on a federal registry of service providers.
After Overdrive reporting on companies facilitating widespread ELD cheating, FMCSA took action and overhauled its ELD company vetting process. In April, FMCSA voided more than 15,000 CDLs after calling out a medical examiner.
And in December, FMCSA began a crackdown on thousands of schools in the agency's Training Provider Registry. Overdrive reporting found many of the 3,000 purged schools hadn't taught CDL drivers in years, and many hadn't ever taught CDL courses. Further reporting revealed FMCSA was doing in-person audits of some 1,500 CDL schools to prove they were teaching real courses, with real trucks.
FMCSA dropping the hammer on all these self-certified service providers raises an important question: Why would the government ever allow trainers, ELD companies or medical examiners to simply promise they'd follow the rules?
Turns out, self-certification for truck driver training providers had been something of a passion project, hitting close to home for many owner-operators. Back in 2013, Overdrive Chief Editor Todd Dills attended the first Entry Level Driver Training listening sessions that would later result in an advisory committee to create the ELDT regulation itself.
Owner-operators pushed for less red tape to become a training provider.
The 26-member ELDT Advisory Committee, which included representatives from the American Trucking Associations and Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association and others, hashed out exactly how the next generation of driver training would unfold.
Owner-operator Bryan Spoon made the case for self-certification at that time, citing the longstanding tradition of truck drivers teaching their families the trade.
“Are we saying that once this all comes out, you will have to pay and attend a formal school?” said Spoon, then an ELDT committee member and OOIDA board member. “There will be no more learning it from family tradition? Or you’re taking the individual father/son operation out of the mix? Everything up here says there’s some kind of school or organization involved…. There are many people [for whom] this is their family business and they train generation to generation. Are we saying that the individual doing the training will have to take some kind of training course and get some kind of [certification] number?”
Commercial Vehicle Training Association Chairman of the Board Jeffrey Burkhardt said Spoon, as well as OOIDA, eventually convinced the committee.
"We were against [self certification] in 2015," when the board delivered its final recommendations, said Burkhardt. He noted Spoon and others on the committee saying they'd "always been able to train [their] families, that they taught their children before and their grandchildren," so why impose lots of red tape on them now?
These days, CVTA is still against self-certification, as it urges FMCSA to crack down on CDL mills and "unscrupulous" actors on the TRP.
[Related: CDL schools call out 'threat' of 'unscrupulous training entities']
"The difficulty [with cleaning up the TRP] is it still self-certification,"said Burkhardt. "Basically they accept everyone who wants on. There's no real oversight. You just download an app and click on the bottom that you agree" to uphold federal training regs.
OOIDA, too, has come around on self-certification.
After DOT announced the TPR cleanup, OOIDA President Todd Spencer said the organization had "long warned that allowing CDL training providers to self-certify invites fraud into the trucking industry and puts road safety at risk for all motorists.”
Yet reached for further comment, OOIDA did not deny that it once supported self-certification.
As designed, self-certification of training providers rested on a trust but verify framework, where FMCSA would allow providers to get onto the training registry with minimal headache, but then police the list. It's that enforcement on the back end that failed, according to OOIDA.
“OOIDA raised concerns with the Training Provider Registry as it became clear that proper oversight was not being conducted during the initial years of implementation," an OOIDA spokesperson told Overdrive.
In the decade that passed between the ELDT reg's adoption and today, so much has changed around trucking that old systems might be expected to crumble under the weight. Overdrive has documented a meteoric rise in the foreign driver population, as well as the proliferation of overseas actors in pushing freight fraud.
"The ELDT Advisory Committee met more than a decade ago, and the industry has now seen how the lack of verification allowed fraud to take hold," the OOIDA spokesperson said. "FMCSA’s recent enforcement actions finally address the gap we warned about by cracking down on bad actors and strengthening accountability. OOIDA will continue to push for more comprehensive training requirements that keep all motorists safe, including English Language Proficiency and minimum behind-the-wheel hours.”
Former police officer and roadside inspector Andy Blair, a current CDL tester, said that with all the changes to trucking and the CDL test itself, self-certification might just not make sense anymore, calling "current vetting processes" insignificant for CDL schools who want approval to train.
"A guy could be a truck driver for 25 years, he could be exceptionally proficient at trucking and set up shop" through TPR self-certification simply by answering a few questions: Is the provider a convicted criminal? Has he/she lost their CDL for any reason? "A few odds and ends" like that, said Blair.
"Now if you took the truck driver that's been driving 25 years with no issues, no complaints, no violations of significance and brought him in and tested him under the current CDL test used nationwide, they would fail badly," said Blair. "Only because the test changed a couple years ago."
Blair said they "dumbed it down some," removing some 58 items from the pre-trip inspection portion. No longer do drivers have to identify if a water pump is gear- or belt-driven, but they will have to mark specific moments in the air brake test now. Generally, Blair said the test no longer expects a driver to be something of a mechanic, instead just focusing on their ability to operate the truck.
"It's very specific, you have to know the PSI and be able to time it in ranges of things to occur," said Blair. "If someone taught you the old version, you would crash and burn."
In the end, it makes plenty of sense why owner-ops wanted to protect their generations-old ability to train their families their way, but after a decade of non-enforcement around the TPR and the proliferation of 48-hour schools and CDL mills, owner-operators are typically calling for more regulation of training providers, not less.
In fact, hundreds of truckers pointed a finger at "CDL mills" in recent Overdrive surveying on the DOT's emergency rulemaking seeking to kick 194,000 non-domiciled CDL drivers out.
If you missed the survey report, download it in full below.
