Originally published at: How an Executive Order reshaped highway safety - FreightWaves
We have never seen a twelve-month period in which the White House, the Department of Transportation, and FMCSA moved as aggressively, as comprehensively, and as effectively on the specific safety failures that haunt our highways and our industry. Before we sit down with Derek Barrs on Monday, here is the year that got us here.
Rob Carpenter’s reporting highlights real failures and real enforcement gains. Pulling unqualified drivers, CDL mills, and bad ELDs out of the system matters.
His conclusion overreaches. The cases he cites don’t just expose bad drivers—they expose broken decision pathways.
In his first example, the load was quadruple-brokered before reaching a chameleon carrier. That’s not an English issue—it’s a chain-of-custody failure. Multiple intermediaries touched a safety-critical decision and no one owned it. Roadside enforcement can’t fix upstream selection.
His second example, a carrier accumulated crashes and penalties, then restarted under successor entities. That’s an identity persistence gap. Closing one DOT number while operations continue under another is not solved by tightening entry alone.
Three structural gaps remain:
- The missing New Entrant field audit.
Authority is granted quickly, but the only real validation—the on-site New Entrant Safety Audit—is often delayed or inconsistent. Without timely field audits, “authorization” is paper compliance, not proof of a functioning operation. - No freight broker safety oversight.
Brokers control carrier selection, yet face no routine safety audits or enforceable vetting standards. The entities deciding who moves freight operate outside the audit regime applied to carriers. - Shipper complicity.
At scale, the largest integrated players—Walmart, Amazon, and FedEx Freight—operate as shipper-carrier-broker hybrids. With that reach comes influence over rates and routing. When price and coverage dominate, risk gets pushed down the chain. The outcome is predictable: lower costs, higher exposure.
The Executive Order tightens the front door—who can drive and how credentials are issued. It does not change how freight is assigned, how carriers are validated over time, or how accountability is enforced when entities reconfigure and reappear.
If the goal is fewer tragedies, the next phase must attach accountability to the decision layer: require documented, auditable carrier selection; enforce timely New Entrant field audits; and bring brokers—and large shipper-brokers—into a real safety oversight framework.
Meanwhile, we’ll may bad actors at the edge. All the while, the system that selects—and sometimes incentivizes—them remains largely unchanged.