Originally published at: Open Borders, Open Trucking - FreightWaves
You can’t own a fishing boat, fly an airplane, broadcast a radio signal, split an atom, or drill for oil in America without proving you’re an American. But you can operate an 80,000-pound commercial motor vehicle on every highway in every state in the nation without being a citizen of this country, or even setting foot in it. Welcome to the American trucking industry, where the door isn’t just open. It’s been taken off the hinges.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (post-Interstate Commerce Commission) is charged with regulating and monitoring the safe and practicible formation and operation of motor carriers and trucking freight brokers. The FMCSA has failed in this role miserably. All you trucking spouses out there who wonder “why” your spouse couldn’t make a decent living in this industry? Here is your answer “why.”
Lost businesses. Lost families. Lost property. Lost and broken lives.
This failure is not defined by a lack of rules. It is defined by the absence of front-end verification. Today, a motor carrier can obtain interstate authority in days, begin hauling freight immediately, generate revenue, and only later—sometimes months later—be evaluated to determine whether it was operationally qualified in the first place. By then, the damage may already be done.
This delayed validation model creates a structural imbalance between compliant operators and disposable entities. Responsible carriers invest heavily in insurance, maintenance, driver qualification, drug testing programs, and regulatory compliance. They build businesses designed to endure. Yet they compete in the same marketplace against entities that exist only as legal shells—entities that can dissolve overnight, leaving behind unpaid debts, safety violations, and financial ruin for those who trusted them.
This is not simply a regulatory oversight problem. It is an economic distortion problem. When operating authority can be obtained without meaningful operational verification, the marketplace becomes flooded with carriers whose compliance exists on paper but not in practice. Freight rates collapse under artificial capacity. Legitimate carriers, who bear the real costs of compliance, are undercut by operators whose business model depends on regulatory delay.
The consequences extend beyond economics. They affect safety, insurance stability, and public trust. When accountability can be shed faster than enforcement can attach, responsibility becomes optional. Equipment, drivers, and dispatch operations persist, while the legal entity disappears. The regulatory identity changes. The operational reality does not.
Other critical sectors of American infrastructure recognize the importance of verifying ownership, control, and operational readiness before granting access. Aviation, maritime, and broadcasting all impose structural validation before authority is granted. Trucking, which moves the majority of the nation’s freight and operates in direct proximity to the public, remains uniquely dependent on post-entry enforcement.
This is backwards.
Highway safety and economic stability depend on verifying operational readiness before authority is granted—not after violations occur. Authority should be earned through demonstrated compliance, not assumed through paperwork alone.
Most carriers would pass such verification without difficulty. They already operate professionally and responsibly. The entities that would struggle are precisely those that should not be operating unsupervised on public highways.
The problems are much deeper than many people realize. Those same foreigners with only 1 truck can use that same authority to take as many loads as it wants as long as the company is verifiable through SAFER. That 1 operator can then disperse these loads to anyone it wants. There is no oversight. It is, and has been a numbers game for a very long time. Brokers, companies, shippers all all looking for the cheapest rate. Hold them responsible. It will end then or when underwriters do their due diligence vetting who is on the load with their Accord certificate. They took over the hotels. They took over the convenience stores. They tried to take over trucking. They come here and take advantage of us economically. Then cheat the system that gave them the opportunity in the first place. The IRS should be looking at those next. Get the cheats out. Thank you.