The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s ban on non-domiciled CDLs currently sits on a knife’s edge awaiting a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, but another, related court case could bring non-domiciled CDL issuance roaring back in California.
Back in September 2025, when FMCSA first began to shut down non-domiciled CDL issuance for 97% of all non-citizens, the agency put California on special notice, finding substantial non-compliance within the state’s licensing.
By November 2025, the D.C. federal court had blocked FMCSA’s non-domiciled CDL ban rulemaking, but very few states came back around to actually issuing non-domiciled CDLs.
[Related: Is a loophole for visa drivers going to sink FMCSA’s non-domiciled CDL ban?]
That’s because FMCSA put most of the states that wanted to issue non-domiciled CDLs -- California, Colorado, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, and many more -- under special instructions not to. Those special instructions weren’t subject to the court's block on FMCSA’s broader rule in November.
Now once again, FMCSA’s non-domiciled CDL ban could get thrown out in court after contentious oral arguments picked over the agency’s logic on Sept. 15.
[Related: FMCSA's non-domiciled CDL ban takes a beating in court]
But just a few days earlier, Sept. 11, the same court heard oral arguments in a related case, California Department of Motor Vehicles v. U.S. DOT, where California’s DMV petitioned the court to vacate FMCSA’s findings of its own CDL program's noncompliance and related federal funding penalties.
More than six weeks after both cases were heard, the court could decide any day now not only to block FMCSA’s rulemaking, but to rule that California did comply with federal regs, potentially letting it resume issuing non-domiciled CDLs once again.
At the time of the September 2025 FMCSA emergency rulemaking, California had issued more than 60,000 non-domiciled CDLs, with DOT saying about a third of those were wrongly issued. Following a protracted battle with FMCSA, the state has since revoked some 17,000 non-domiciled CDLs and, for the first time ever, started enforcing English language regs.
The battle's now spilled over into court.
California v. DOT: What oral arguments revealed
Deputy Attorney General Kristen Keo, petitioner for California DMV, told the court Sept. 11 that FMCSA’s final determination of state licensing noncompliance “must be vacated because it is contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious.”
FMCSA’s determination, she said, “cites just one basis for its decision to withhold $160 million of highway funding from California” -- that “DMV had not canceled approximately 20,000 licenses with expiration dates that exceeded the date on the driver's legal presence documentation.”
Keo argued that no federal law required those cancellations, and all of the licenses complied with federal law. DOT disagreed, saying California issued over-long CDL terms for non-citizens, but the court mostly dealt with the issue of whether or not California and FMCSA had a mutually-agreed-upon timetable for revoking CDLs and making changes.
DOT’s lawyer, Simon Jerome, argued that FMCSA and states often resolve issues “informally,” and that thanks to some “inartful” drafting of communications between the parties, there was not a mutually confirmed timetable; nonetheless, California said it would take certain actions and later changed course.
Whether or not the whirlwind of communications between FMCSA and California over the holidays in 2025 constitutes an agreement under the Administrative Procedure Act is the kind of question judges get paid the big bucks to answer. And in examining the case, the judges poked a pretty serious flaw in FMCSA’s reason for penalizing California.
The crux of FMCSA’s licensing noncompliance findings in the Golden State rests on CDLs issued in excess of a work authorization’s valid period. Someone with a work authorization document valid until tomorrow could get a CDL issued for up to eight years under the system FMCSA reviewed.
But work authorizations most often renew, and the expiration date listed technically is just when the card expires.
Here’s how one on the panel of judges explained away the bulk of California’s non-domiciled CDL issuance problems:
“It sounds like the more normal operation of this would be that you're presented with a document that's going to expire in say a year. And I understand this is no longer the case, but for many employment authorization documents until 2025, they would automatically renew. So when you say the license should expire when the document does, you don't know when that document's going to expire. In fact, the default was, for many folks, these are going to be automatically renewed. So, it doesn't actually seem that unusual at all that you wouldn't force someone who is going to get an automatic renewal to also come back to the state and say, ‘Hey, I got my automatic renewal. Please extend me for one more year.' It would be a mountain of paperwork."
The same notion, that work authorizations don’t really expire, was raised during the oral arguments about FMCSA’s broader non-domiciled CDL ban.
The court should soon decide on these cases, likely both together. If the court blocks FMCSA’s non-domiciled CDL ban, many states will remain under special instructions not to re-issue such licenses. But if the court also grants California's petition against the agency's noncompliance findings, California will not need to abide by its own special instructions.
Of course, FMCSA could win its cases, California could lose, FMCSA could issue another rulemaking or some other special order to California blocking non-domiciled CDLs.
But in issuing the non-domiciled CDL ban final rule earlier this year, FMCSA stated that it needed to move quickly or there could be a surge of non-domiciled CDL applicants hoping to be grandfathered in, so to speak, before the rule took effect.
If the court finds California can’t be penalized by FMCSA for its non-domiciled CDL issuance practices, and there’s no broader rule blocking issuance, that licensing demand could ultimately find its way to the Golden State.
[Related: California capitulation: CHP finally enforcing English proficiency roadside]
