Nearly 44% of the 16,000 U.S. driving schools may be forced to close if they lose their students after the federal Department of Transportation found they were not meeting government requirements.
The Department of Transportation said Monday it plans to decertify nearly 3,000 schools if they fail to meet training requirements in the next 30 days. Targeted schools must notify students that their certification is in jeopardy. A further 4,500 schools are being warned they could face similar action.
Schools that lose their certification will no longer be able to issue certificates showing that a driver has completed the training required to obtain a license, so students are likely to leave those schools.
Separately, the Department of Homeland Security is auditing immigrant-owned trucking firms in California to verify the status of their drivers and whether they are qualified to hold a commercial driver’s license.
This crackdown on schools and trucking companies is the latest step in the government’s drive to ensure truck drivers are qualified and fit to hold a commercial licence. It began after a truck driver who Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy says was not authorized to be in the U.S. made an illegal U-turn and caused a crash in Florida that killed three people.
The actions drive “illegal and unscrupulous practices that allow poorly trained drivers to get behind the wheel of trucks and school buses,” Duffy said.
Duffy threatened to pull federal funding from California and Pennsylvania over the issue and proposed significant new restrictions on how immigrants can get a commercial driver’s license, but the court put the new rules on hold. On Monday, he threatened to withhold $30.4 million from Minnesota unless the state fixes flaws in its commercial driver’s license program and revokes any licenses that should never have been issued, either because they were valid beyond the driver’s work permit or because the state never verified the driver’s immigration status.
So far, every state Duffy has threatened has been a Democratic state, but he said the department is looking into a number of other states, including Texas and South Dakota.
Claire Lancaster, spokeswoman for Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, said, “We take safety on our roads seriously and the Minnesota Department of Public Safety has already been working to ensure we are in compliance with federal law.”
It’s unclear how the crackdown on these trucking schools might affect the current driver shortage, but Andrew Poliakoff, executive director of the largest trucking school association, said many of the decertified schools were questionable “CDL mills” that would advertise that they would be able to train drivers in just a few days.
In established training schools, students normally spend at least a month and receive lessons both behind the wheel and in the classroom.
He said these dubious schools are really just “bilking people out of their money” without teaching them the skills they need to get accepted or pass the test.
“Trucking is a unique career. And people who are not familiar with the industry may see someone charging $1,000 for $2,000 for a long weekend or a quick training session. And they may think it’s desirable, but it really isn’t,” said Poliakoff, who heads the Commercial Vehicle Training Association, which includes 100 schools with 400 locations nationwide. None of these schools were certified.
The Department for Transport said the 3,000 schools it is taking action against failed to meet training standards and failed to keep accurate and complete records. Schools are also accused of falsifying or manipulating training data.
Some of them were inactive before this event.
Owner Yogi Sanwal said his company is closing its truck driving school in 2022. It did so after making some changes to meet federal accreditation requirements, which in turn prompted the county government to make upgrades such as replacing sand and gravel with asphalt. At the time, the company did not have the $150,000 it needed to do so, so it closed the school. In the four to five years that the school has been open, it has trained about 500 truck drivers, Sanwal said.
Freight industry groups have praised the effort tighten licensing standards and ensure drivers can meet basic English proficiency requirements that the Trump administration began enforcing this summer. But groups that represent immigrant truck drivers say they believe many qualified drivers and companies are being targeted simply because of their citizenship status.
“Bad actors exploiting loopholes in our regulatory systems put everyone at risk. This is unacceptable,” said Paul J. Enos, CEO of the Nevada Trucking Association. “We are focused on solutions and committed to seeing them implemented.”
Todd Spencer, president of the Owner Operators Association of Independent Drivers, said the industry has long warned of potential problems if trucking schools are allowed to certify themselves.
“When training standards are weak or in some cases non-existent, drivers are not prepared and everyone on the road pays,” Spencer said.
Truck drivers of the Sikh faith have been caught in the crossfire and faced harassment because the drivers in a crash in Florida and another fatal crash in California this fall were both Sikhs. The North American Punjabi Truckers Association estimates that the Sikh workforce makes up about 40% of truck drivers on the West Coast and about 20% nationally. Advocacy groups estimate that there are about 150,000 Sikh truck drivers working in the US
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to questions about the effort to verify the immigration status of truck drivers, but the advocacy group UNITED SIKHS said it had heard directly from Punjabi company owners about these aggressive audits of immigration records.
“Sikhs and trucking immigrants with unblemished records are viewed as suspects while keeping American freight moving,” the group UNITED SIKHS said. “When federal authorities label legal and licensed drivers as a risk, it doesn’t improve safety — it fuels xenophobia, harassment and even violence on the roads. Any policy built on fear instead of facts threatens families, civil rights and the nation’s supply chain.”
California has moved to revoke 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses after federal officials raised concerns that they were improperly issued to immigrants or allowed to remain valid long after a driver’s work permit had expired.
Writer Audrey McAvoy contributed to this story.
This article was generated from an automated news agency source without text modification.
