A year ago, the Training Provider Registry had about 16,000 entries and no minimum training hours. Since then, FMCSA has removed thousands of schools, tied 110 of them to more than 5,000 drivers who later failed English checks, and started auditing the examiners. The next administration can undo every piece of that unless Congress changes the self-certification rule underneath it.
Entry-Level Driver Training took effect Feb. 7, 2022, at 49 CFR Part 380, subpart F, with the registry in subpart G. It requires a first-time Class A or B applicant, or a driver seeking a hazmat, passenger or school bus endorsement, to complete a curriculum from a provider listed on FMCSA’s Training Provider Registry before taking the skills test. The theory portion covers more than 30 topics. The behind-the-wheel portion runs until the provider decides the student is proficient. There’s no minimum number of hours, and a provider gets on the registry by certifying online that it meets the requirements. The American Trucking Association told members at the time there were “no minimum training hours required nor new exorbitant costs.” That design choice made the registry easy to join and hard to police.
By late 2025, about 16,000 providers were listed. On Dec. 1, 2025, FMCSA removed nearly 3,000 and put about 4,500 on notice for potential noncompliance, and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said they’d failed to meet the administration’s standards. Reporting from Overdrive found some of the flagged entries had never trained a driver, including a small Kentucky fleet that started the paperwork and let it lapse. In January 2026, FMCSA removed about 3,800 of the 4,500. In February, more than 300 federal investigators ran 1,426 on-site visits over five days and issued 448 proposed removals, while 109 providers took themselves off. FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs said schools without the right vehicles or qualified instructors “have no business training the next generation of truckers.” By March, the removals passed 7,000.
On Aug. 31, 2026, in Detroit, DOT announced the emergency removal of 110 more schools. FMCSA matched drivers cited at roadside for failing English proficiency back to the providers that certified their training and said the 110 schools accounted for more than 5,000 of those drivers. It issued proposed removals to more than 160 others after about 400 investigations in 40 states and opened a nationwide audit of third-party CDL skills testers and of how states oversee them. Homeland Security Investigations served inspection notices at more than 200 driving schools across 23 states the same day.
The testers
The skills test is the last gate, and the corruption cases keep coming out of it. From May 2019 to January 2023, the Massachusetts State Police CDL unit in Stoughton gave passing scores to at least 17 applicants flagged with the code word “golden,” whether or not they passed, according to a 74-count federal indictment unsealed in January 2024 against Sgt. Gary Cederquist, Trooper Joel Rogers, retired Troopers Calvin Butner and Perry Mendes, driving school employee Scott Camara, and water company employee Eric Mathison. The Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles revoked the CDLs of 26 drivers tied to the scheme.
On May 2, 2025, a federal jury in Boston convicted Cederquist, who ran the unit from 2017 to early 2023, on 48 counts, including extortion conspiracy, extortion, honest services mail fraud, falsifying records and false statements. The jury acquitted him on nine counts, including the allegations that he extorted a snowblower and a granite mailbox and post. Prosecutors said the bribes that did land included a driveway worth more than $10,000 and about $8,300 in bottled water and beverages. In texts, he and a co-defendant joked about applicants. “This guy’s a mess,” one read. On Oct. 14, 2025, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani sentenced him to six years in prison. Assistant U.S. Attorney Adam Deitch told the court Cederquist had run the unit as “the friends and family program.”
In Washington state, investigators alleged that Skyline CDL School sent gold envelopes of cash, each marked with a student’s date of birth, to independent tester Jason Hodson. Between April 2023 and September 2024, Hodson recorded 877 exams, 822 of them for Skyline students, and 80% of the students who were retested failed. Washington shut Skyline down, and the school kept operating in Oregon.
The oldest case is still the worst. Under Illinois Secretary of State George Ryan in the 1990s, CDLs were sold for bribes that funded his campaign. One of those licenses went to Ricardo Guzman, whose truck dropped debris on a Milwaukee interstate in 1994 that caused the crash that killed six of the Rev. Scott and Janet Willis’s children. Ryan served more than five years in federal prison and died in May 2025 at 91.
What Dalilah’s Law would add
Section 8 of Dalilah’s Law requires DOT to issue a final rule within 18 months of enactment that revises the self-certification process for the Training Provider Registry, so every registrant meets federal requirements when it first certifies and remains compliant for the full certification period. Within 180 days after that rule takes effect, every provider on the registry would have to recertify under the new standard, and DOT could remove anyone who doesn’t. The purge FMCSA has run since December used existing authority to remove providers after the fact. Section 8 would change the front door.
Section 2 requires every knowledge and skills test to be given only in English. The Aug. 31 English data is the first public link between specific schools and specific roadside failures, and English-only testing would close one way a driver who can’t read a sign still passes a written exam.
The bill doesn’t set minimum training hours, doesn’t touch third-party testing, and doesn’t set sentences for CDL fraud. Those were three of the seven fixes my original piece called for, along with unannounced school inspections, standardized English assessments at every stage, and a federal floor for teen driver education. FMCSA has now done the unannounced inspections at scale and has started on the testers. The hours question is still open. My position hasn’t moved: 160 hours of combined classroom and behind-the-wheel training for a Class A license, with proficiency standards a school can’t waive.
Some of the schools removed since December were never mills. They were carriers and community programs that filed the registry paperwork and never trained anyone, or trained a handful of drivers and let the renewal slide. An eastern North Carolina Baptist church, a Head Start program, and a community college were among the 61 involuntary North Carolina removals, according to The Center Square. A mass purge of a self-certified list catches paperwork lapses along with fraud, and a school that lost its listing over a missed form is out of business anyway. A front-door rule under Section 8 is how you stop needing a purge.
The automatic transmission also changed the skills test. Fewer than 10% of heavy trucks had automatics a decade ago, and more than 95% of new Class 8 trucks ship with them now. A skills test taken in an automatic earns a restriction, but the manual gearbox no longer filters anyone out of the industry, and nothing in ELDT replaced what it used to test.
The Florida Turnpike driver who killed three people in August 2025 failed Washington’s CDL knowledge exam 10 times before he passed. The Massachusetts sergeant who sold passing scores got six years. More than 7,000 schools are off the registry. Nothing in the rules yet stops someone from getting on it tomorrow by checking a box.