The Government Confession: What FMCSA's 2026 Regulatory Agenda Tells You

The Department of Transportation published its 2026 unified regulatory agenda on July 7, over a year behind its normal schedule, and the trucking items on it is what you need to understand

The Department of Transportation published its 2026 unified regulatory agenda on July 7, over a year behind its normal schedule, and the trucking items on it run from a driverless-truck operating framework to whether a tractor needs a license-plate lamp while it’s towing a trailer. An agenda is a list of intentions with estimated dates attached, and the estimated dates on federal agendas slip the way delivery appointments slip, which is to say routinely and without apology. Some of these items have been “active” since before the iPhone had a front-facing camera. What the agenda actually tells you is where the agency believes its own machinery is broken, because an agency doesn’t open a rulemaking to fix something that works. Read that way, this agenda is a confession list: what each rule is, where it came from, why it’s surfacing now, and who gets hit when it lands.

The New Entrant Rule

Anyone with about $300 and an internet connection can register a trucking company with the federal government. That’s the new entrant problem at root, and the fix FMCSA is now considering, a proficiency examination before authority is granted, has been sitting in the agency’s files since a 2009 advance notice of proposed rulemaking. The docket is RIN 2126-AB17, it traces partly to a petition from Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, and the agenda now projects a supplemental proposal for November 2026. A safety question first formally asked in 2009 is scheduled to produce a proposal seventeen years later, and a proposal is not a rule.

A new applicant files an OP-1 or its Unified Registration System equivalent, certifies familiarity with the safety regulations by checking a box, and receives operating authority after a protest period. The government’s first real look at the operation comes afterward, in the form of a new entrant safety audit due within the first twelve months, and that audit is largely a records review. Nobody tests whether the applicant can identify an hours-of-service violation, calculate a bridge formula, or explain what a driver qualification file contains. The certification is self-certification. A checked box, in other words, and the box has no memory of who checked it last time.

That’s where the fraud economy lives. A carrier gets its authority revoked, its insurance canceled, or its safety record poisoned, and the same trucks, the same people, and the same freight reappear under a new DOT number with clean history. New paper over old iron. The industry calls that operator a chameleon carrier, and the regulatory term is reincarnation. The current new entrant process doesn’t just fail to catch these operators. It’s the front door they walk through, because the process asks nothing that a fraudulent applicant can’t answer with a self-cert checkbox. A proficiency exam won’t stop a determined chameleon on its own, and the industry doesn’t have to speculate about that, because the natural experiment has already run at the state level.

Minnesota requires carrier testing across every category the federal government uses to measure carrier behavior, the BASICs, and Minnesota is home to some of the worst-performing carriers in existence. The reason isn’t a mystery once you look at how the test is administered. It’s an online exam with no identity validation and no proctoring, so nobody can confirm that the person answering the questions is the one who’ll run the operation, and a cottage industry of compliance consultants sits ready to take the exam for whoever pays them. A test a proxy can pass measures the proxy. What an unproctored exam screens for is the applicant’s willingness to spend a few hundred dollars on a hired expert, and the fraudulent operator spends that money faster than the honest one, since to him the exam is just another document in the packet. None of that makes testing worthless. It makes unverified testing theater, and theater with a federal seal on it is worse than nothing, because it lets the agency tell Congress the gate exists. What a well-built exam does is raise the cost of entry, create a verifiable identity event at registration, and give investigators one more record to match against. Whether FMCSA pairs the exam with real identity verification, proctoring, and a tested person tied by name to the application is the question that decides whether this rule matters, and the agenda is silent on all three.

The pressure to move now is coming from two directions. Congress and the state licensing scandals of the past two years put non-domiciled CDL issuance and registration fraud on the front page, and the agency’s own new entrant call center contract drew scrutiny for what taxpayers were getting for the money.

The Registration System That Was Supposed to Exist in 2015

Congress ordered a single, consolidated federal registration system in MAP-21, the 2012 highway bill. It was called the Unified Registration System; it was supposed to replace the tangle of MC numbers, DOT numbers, and paper filings with one online front door, and its second phase has been suspended since 2017. Carriers registering today still interact with a hybrid of the old and the half-built new. The MC number, which FMCSA has been promising to retire for a decade, still governs how brokers and shippers identify authority. RIN 2126-AB56 is the agency’s plan to propose the remaining MAP-21 changes and, just as important, to codify its own procedures for granting, suspending, and revoking registrations. The agenda projects a proposal for July 2026, which is this month, so watch the Federal Register.

Codifying revocation procedure sounds like housekeeping. It isn’t. Registration is the chokepoint for every fraud pattern in this industry because every scheme needs an active DOT number, just as every business needs a bank account. Right now, the standards for suspending or revoking a registration exist partly in regulation and partly in agency practice, and practice is hard to litigate against and even harder to apply consistently. Written rules for who gets removed from the system and how would give the agency a faster, more defensible mechanism for pulling paper on operators who exist only on paper. The rule applies to brokers and freight forwarders too, not just carriers, and the broker side of the registration system is where double-brokering and identity theft problems are concentrated. If the proposal includes identity verification at registration, this becomes one of the most consequential items on the agenda. If it’s a fee-and-forms cleanup, it’s another decade of the same front door.

Safety Fitness: The Rating System Nobody Can Use

FMCSA sorts carriers into three ratings: satisfactory, conditional, and unsatisfactory. The framework dates to the late 1980s; it depends on the agency physically conducting a compliance review, and the agency has the capacity to review only a small fraction of the carrier population in any year. The result is that the overwhelming majority of the two million-plus entities in the registration system carry no rating at all, and among carriers that do have one, the rating may be decades old. I’ve taken apart the maintenance program of a carrier with a satisfactory rating and no open violations; the rating was 11 years old. It described a company that no longer existed in any operational sense. That’s what “satisfactory” can mean under the current rule: a snapshot from a prior ownership, a prior fleet, and a prior safety director, presented to the public as a current federal judgment.

The history is a graveyard. FMCSA tried to fix this in January 2016 with a proposed Safety Fitness Determination rule that would have replaced the three-tier system with a single “unfit” determination driven by roadside inspection data. Industry opposition and methodological criticism, including a 2014 GAO report questioning whether the underlying SMS percentiles reliably identified high-risk carriers, killed it, and the agency withdrew the proposal in March 2017. It came back with an advance notice in 2023 asking the same questions again: should ratings use inspection data, and should the three tiers survive? RIN 2126-AC52 now projects a proposed rule for November 2026, which would make it the third serious run at this problem in a decade.

The reason it’s back now is the Supreme Court’s decision in the Montgomery litigation ended the argument over whether brokers and shippers can be held to answer for the carriers they select, and the freight economy is now full of companies legally exposed for carrier selection with no usable federal fitness signal to select on. A conditional rating from 2013 is not a vetting tool. An unrated carrier is not a vetted carrier. The private market has been filling that vacuum with data products, mine among them, and the agency knows that a fitness system the public can’t rely on is a fitness system in name only. The open question the agenda doesn’t answer is whether FMCSA will rate carriers continuously from data or keep ratings tied to episodic reviews. That choice decides whether the rule fixes the problem or renames it.

ELD revisions

Congress mandated electronic logging devices in MAP-21; the FMCSA published the final rule in December 2015; and the industry reached full compliance in December 2017, with the grandfathered older recorders phased out by the end of 2019. The theory was that an electronic record would end the paper logbook fiction. The practice has been more complicated, and RIN 2126-AC50, which began with a 2022 advance notice and now projects a proposal for November 2026, is the agency’s attempt to absorb what eight years of field experience taught it.

The design flaw the revision has to confront is self-certification. Any vendor can register an ELD on FMCSA’s list by certifying that the device meets the technical specification. The agency doesn’t test devices before listing them. That structure produced a registry with hundreds of listed devices, a long tail of vendors nobody in the industry has heard of, and a periodic cycle of revocations when a device is finally examined and found non-compliant. Worse than the non-compliant devices are the compliant-looking ones built for fraud. I’ve investigated and continue to investigate ELD vendors whose product, as a practical matter, was log falsification as a service: edited driving time, ghost co-drivers absorbing hours, and support staff walking carriers through the edits. A device like that passes a roadside transfer test because the fraud is in the record-keeping upstream of the transfer. The falsification didn’t die with paper logs. It professionalized.

For carriers, a revision could clarify malfunction procedures, edit rules, and personal conveyance, which are the recurring compliance fights. For ELD providers, the stakes are existential. If FMCSA moves from self-certification toward third-party testing or agency certification, which is the direction its own lessons-learned record points, a meaningful share of the current registry doesn’t survive the transition, and every surviving vendor eats a re-certification cost. Fleets should think about vendor concentration risk now, because a carrier running a fringe device that gets revoked mid-rule has days, not quarters, to replace hardware across a fleet.

The Clearinghouse

The Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse came out of a 2016 final rule and went live in January 2020, giving employers a central database of CDL driver violations and ending the era where a driver could fail a test at one carrier and hire on down the road the same month. The second phase, finalized in 2021 with a compliance date of November 18, 2024, connected the database to state licensing agencies so that a prohibited-status driver loses the CDL itself, not just the job. The population of drivers in prohibited status has run well into six figures since the system opened, and most of them never start the return-to-duty process. They didn’t evaporate. Some left the industry. Some are driving something that doesn’t require a CDL. Some are driving trucks anyway, for carriers that don’t query.

RIN 2126-AC43 projects a proposal for November 2026 aimed at getting more violation information into the system, streamlining processes, and aligning the Clearinghouse rules with the underlying testing regulations in Part 40. The agenda doesn’t name the specific gaps, but the field does. Owner-operators who are their own employer sit in a structural conflict, since the rule asks the violator to report the violation. Small-carrier queries are inconsistent. Test-cheating products remain a retail industry. If the proposal touches query obligations, reporting duties, or return-to-duty administration, every employer’s DOT testing program has revision work coming, and third-party administrators should expect their procedures to be part of the redesign.

Automatic Emergency Braking

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, signed in November 2021, ordered FMCSA and NHTSA to mandate automatic emergency braking on heavy trucks, and it gave them a deadline that has already passed. The agencies proposed the rule in July 2023, took heavy comment on performance standards, false-activation risk, and maintenance obligations, and now schedule a supplemental proposal for July 2026 under RIN 2126-AC49 and NHTSA’s companion, RIN 2127-AM36. A supplemental proposal at this stage means the agencies are reworking the performance requirements rather than finalizing them, which pushes any compliance date for new tractors further out.

AEB on a loaded combination vehicle isn’t AEB on a sedan. Radar and camera systems that phantom-brake an 80,000-pound vehicle in traffic create their own crash risk, and drivers who experience false activations start distrusting the system, which defeats it. The maintenance side matters just as much and gets less attention: the proposal contemplates motor carrier obligations to keep the systems functional, which means AEB faults become inspection items, out-of-service considerations, and maintenance-file entries. Fleets specing trucks today are already buying the hardware, since the major OEMs made AEB standard years ago. The rule converts an equipment feature into a compliance obligation, and the difference between those two things is who gets cited when the sensor fails.

AVs…

The safety regulations assume a human in the seat. Hours of service, drug testing, CDL standards, and the driving rules in Part 392 all regulate a person. An automated driving system has no hours to log, no urine to test, and no license to hold, and FMCSA has been circling the question of how to regulate its operation since listening sessions and a 2019 advance notice, followed by a second advance notice in 2023. RIN 2126-AC17 is designated a major rule, and the agenda projects the proposal for August 2026, which would make it the first comprehensive federal operating framework for driverless commercial trucks.

Driver qualification, testing, licensing, operation, equipment, and inspection and maintenance are all on the table. The stakes for the industry aren’t limited to the autonomy developers. The rule will decide questions such as who performs the pre-trip inspection on a driverless truck, what a roadside inspection of one looks like, and which entity holds the safety obligations a driver used to hold. States have been legislating in the vacuum, and a federal framework will preempt some of that patchwork and ratify the rest. Carriers who think this rule is about somebody else’s trucks should remember that the same docket will define remote-assistant roles and inspection duties that bleed into conventional operations. The technology has been hauling freight in Texas without a safety driver for over a year, and just this month, the FMCSA granted Aurora a waiver allowing its driverless trucks to satisfy the roadside warning-device requirement through alternative means. The regulation is arriving after the fact, which is the normal order of things and never the safe one.

ELDT Gets Two Rulemakings

Entry-level driver training took effect in February 2022 after a five-year delay: a federal curriculum, a Training Provider Registry, and a requirement that new CDL applicants train with a registered provider. The structural weakness was the same one the ELD rule has. Providers self-certify to the registry; tens of thousands did, and the registry became home to legitimate schools, one-truck training operations, and outright CDL mills that sold certificates. I’ve walked the field ends of that problem, and the distance between what the registry says a provider is and what’s happening on the training pad can be the width of the fraud.

The agenda answers that with two separate actions, and the second one is new. The first, RIN 2126-AC71, is an advance notice projected for November 2026, with a scope broader than its title suggests. FMCSA wants comment on additions to the training requirements, on the physical safety of women drivers and trainees, on reducing workplace sexual harassment, and on protecting vulnerable road users, meaning pedestrians and cyclists. The harassment piece deserves more attention than it will get. The team-training model puts a trainee in a sleeper cab with a stranger for weeks; the industry has known for decades what that arrangement produces, and the litigation record at the mega-carriers documents it. If the agency writes training-environment standards, carrier finishing programs and trainer-qualification practices become regulated territory for the first time.

The second action, RIN 2126-AD00, is a proposed rule to strengthen the standards for ELDT training providers themselves, including the possibility that providers would have to demonstrate ongoing compliance to remain listed rather than self-certifying once and disappearing from the registry. Read those two dockets together, and the direction is unmistakable. An agency asking how to improve training is an agency one step from asking why it lets anyone claim to provide it, and AD00 is that step. A registry with continuing-compliance obligations, audits, and delisting authority looks less like a directory and more like a licensing regime, which is what the certificate mills have never had to survive. Legitimate schools should welcome it and start building their documentation now, because the providers with real curricula, real ranges, and real instructor files are the ones a compliance regime protects.

The Deregulatory Batch

Nine final rules from the current deregulatory push are already in effect. Three of them touch daily paperwork. The ELD operator’s manual no longer has to ride in the cab, effective July 22, 2026, though the instruction sheet explaining data-transfer methods still does, and a driver who can’t produce and transfer records at roadside has a problem no manual ever solved (91 FR 37050). Electronic driver vehicle inspection reports are now expressly permitted under RIN 2126-AC89, which they functionally already were, and the value of the rule is that it removes the last excuse a paper-bound safety department had for not modernizing the defect-and-repair loop. Completed roadside inspection reports go back to the issuing state only if that state asks, effective July 22 under RIN 2126-AC90, and the part of that rule that didn’t change is the part that matters in litigation: the obligation to correct defects and certify repairs survives in full, and the inspection report in your file with an uncorrected defect and no certification is still the exhibit it always was.

The 95% fuel-tank fill restriction from 1973 is gone (RIN 2126-AC91), while the rest of the fuel-system design and leakage standards remain in place. Dual-status military technicians and civilian employees required to hold reserve membership now qualify for the military CDL exception (RIN 2126-AC92). Certain pre-2010 portable conveyors in aggregate operations get a conditioned exception from the all-wheel brake requirement (RIN 2126-AC93), small auxiliary tanks of five gallons or less feeding non-vehicle equipment get a fuel-feed exception (RIN 2126-AC94), tractors towing trailers no longer need a rear license-plate lamp (91 FR 7871), and the regulations now say plainly that tire sidewall load markings aren’t federally required (91 FR 7884). Each piece of equipment is an exception with conditions, not an exemption from the surrounding standards. The conditions live in the final rule text, not the press release, and a roadside inspector’s familiarity with a March 2026 exception is not guaranteed, so keep a copy of the applicable rule with the equipment file. More de-listing is queued behind these: the agenda carries final-stage actions to remove rear impact guard label requirements (RIN 2126-AC81) and the spare-fuse requirement (RIN 2126-AC83).

Three more housekeeping items are still upstream, and one of them isn’t housekeeping at all. A proposal targeted for November 2026 would thin the record-retention schedule in Appendix A to Part 379 (RIN 2126-AC16), and until it’s final, the existing retention periods still bind you, which matters because destroyed records with a live retention obligation become spoliation the day a crash turns into a lawsuit. A September 2026 proposal (RIN 2126-AC56) would harmonize the securement rule for tiered dressed lumber with Canada’s National Safety Code and replace the catch-all safe-operating-condition requirement for parts and accessories with specific violation provisions, which sounds technical and will quietly change what inspectors write, since a specific violation code is enforceable and appealable in ways a catch-all never was. The one final-stage item that hasn’t produced a final rule is the definition of “medical treatment” for accident reporting (RIN 2126-AC95), so the existing definition in 49 C.F.R. § 390.5T still controls what goes in your accident register, and getting that register wrong distorts your recordable-crash rate, which feeds your safety fitness picture, which is about to matter more than it has in forty years.

The Rest of the Docket

The agenda carries a second tier of items that didn’t make most of the coverage, and several of them will touch more operators than the marquee rules. Broker transparency is the loudest. OOIDA petitioned FMCSA in May 2020 to put teeth in 49 C.F.R. § 371.3, the regulation that has given carriers a right to see the broker’s transaction record since the ICC era, a right that broker contracts routinely waive away in the fine print. The agency published a proposed rule in November 2024 (RIN 2126-AC63, docket FMCSA-2023-0257); the docket drew roughly seven thousand comments, and the new agenda targets a supplemental proposal for this month. The fight is over whether transparency is a regulatory duty or a contractual right, because a right the broker can waive in its template agreement is functionally not a right at all. Whatever lands, small carriers running brokered freight should watch this docket the way brokers watched Montgomery.

The CDL system itself has four actions moving. The non-domiciled CDL restriction is furthest along: FMCSA already issued an interim final rule limiting when states can issue or renew non-domiciled CDLs, and the permanent final rule remains on the agenda (RIN 2126-AC98). A planned proposal on CDL security standards (RIN 2126-AD03) would tighten record retention and document verification at the state licensing agencies, which is the federal government reaching into the state DMV process after the licensing scandals proved the states weren’t policing it themselves. A proposal to codify English-language proficiency as an out-of-service criterion (RIN 2126-AC99) would move that enforcement push from policy memo to regulation, which makes it durable across administrations and litigable in a way a memo isn’t. A final-stage action would end the requirement that CDL holders self-report convictions to their home state (RIN 2126-AC85), a duty that existed mostly on paper anyway, since the state-to-state electronic conviction exchange now does the real work.

The remainder is a mix of relief and cleanup. A final-stage rulemaking would let certain drivers, school and passenger buses mostly, roll through highway-rail grade crossings equipped with active warning devices instead of stopping (RIN 2126-AC39). The agricultural commodity hours-of-service definitions from the 2020 interim rule are queued for a permanent final rule (RIN 2126-AC24). Emergency-declaration relief would revert from 14 days to 30 (RIN 2126-AC77), and the CDL information system would move to user fees (RIN 2126-AC78). Worth remembering what fell off the list entirely: the heavy-truck speed limiter rulemaking, a decade in the making, was canceled in June 2025 and doesn’t appear on this agenda at all. Rules die quieter than they’re born.

The Highway Bill

Surface transportation funding expires September 30. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee ordered its reauthorization bill reported in May, the BUILD America 250 Act, H.R. 8870, and on July 1 the Congressional Research Service updated R48759, its commercial trucking issues report, the document committee staff actually work from when they need trucking explained fast. The rulemaking list above is the executive branch’s repair list. The highway bill is the legislative branch’s, and the two converge on the same broken layers of the same system.

Nearly every marquee rule on this agenda was born in a highway bill. MAP-21 ordered the ELD mandate and the Unified Registration System in 2012. The 2021 infrastructure law ordered the AEB rule and created the Truck Leasing Task Force. The agenda is FMCSA turning in homework from the last two bills, some of it late, since AEB blew a statutory deadline and the registration modernization is on year twenty-five. The next bill assigns new tasks to the same desk. Section 5101 of H.R. 8870 would direct DOT to define predatory lease-purchase programs and prohibit them by regulation within two years, with outcome recordkeeping and a mandatory disclosure form, an entire rulemaking that doesn’t appear on this agenda because the statute creating it doesn’t exist yet. The bill would also require an automated red-flag system inside Motus, the new registration platform, to screen suspicious registrant data at the front door. Count the roads to the same gate: a statutory red-flag screen, a proficiency exam proceeding, and a registration revocation rewrite are three separate answers to who gets a DOT number and how you take it away. Dalilah’s Law, H.R. 5688, would reach offshore dispatch and brokerage operations that commit fraud from outside the country, and section 7109 would establish a twenty-member cargo theft and freight fraud advisory committee. The chameleon carrier problem is named in the CRS report. So is the registration system’s inability to keep bad actors out.

Testimony season follows. Reauthorization hearings will put Secretary Duffy and Administrator Barrs at witness tables between now and conference, and the question lines write themselves because the documents generating them are already public. Why did the AEB rule miss a deadline Congress wrote into law, the one oversight sin with no partisan valence? Why are truckers struggling to use the new registration system, a difficulty CRS has now entered into the record, and why did a portal take a quarter century? Where is the broker transparency rule that every member with owner-operator mail in the district will ask for, and seven thousand comments in the docket guarantee the mail exists? What is the agency doing about carriers that shut down on Friday and reregister under new paper on Monday? Why can’t FMCSA say whether a $750,000 insurance minimum set in 1980 is adequate in 2026, and the honest answer, that settlement values hide behind NDAs and insurer data is proprietary, won’t satisfy the members carrying the $5 million bill. Every one of those is the same question in different clothes: Congress gave you mandates; where’s the delivery? The agency will sit at the table asking for new authority while being graded on the old, and how that goes decides which deadlines get hard-coded into the next bill instead of left to agenda estimates.

What Comes Next

Everything above is measured, on the agenda, linked, and datable. This section is my read. Active rulemakings side by side, and a pattern shows that no single docket announces. AB17 questions who gets into the industry. AB56 questions how registrations get revoked. AC52 questions how carriers get rated. AC50 questions whether the compliance record can be believed. AD00 questions whether the training credential means anything. Five separate dockets, one subject: the federal trust infrastructure of trucking, every layer of which the fraud economy has spent a decade exploiting in ways that finally became too visible to ignore. The agency isn’t writing twenty unrelated rules. It’s rebuilding the chain of custody regarding who is allowed to put eighty thousand pounds on a public road.

If that project keeps rolling downhill, the next dominoes are predictable. The ELD registry follows the training registry: once AD00 establishes that self-certification onto a federal list is a policy failure, the identical structure in the ELD rule can’t survive the comparison, and third-party device certification becomes a matter of when. Worth noting: Canada uses third-party certification, and the UK has only three approved tachograph manufacturers.

The fitness rule, if it moves to continuous, data-driven determinations, drags the SMS methodology fight back into rulemaking, because you can’t rate two million carriers based on inspection data without defending the math that GAO shredded in 2014. Downstream of all of it sits the broker-and-shipper side. The financial responsibility rule finished phasing in this January, the transparency proposal is due any day, and a Supreme Court decision has already told the freight economy that carrier selection carries legal consequence. A federal carrier-selection standard, the rule the brokerage industry has alternately demanded and dreaded for fifteen years, stops being hypothetical the day FMCSA finishes a fitness system worth relying on. If Congress hard-codes rulemaking deadlines in the reauthorization, as MAP-21 and the 2021 law did, the agenda dates above stop being estimates and become statutory obligations with attached oversight hearings. That’s the endgame this agenda is quietly building toward, whether the agency says so or not.

What to Do With All of This

Pull the operator’s manual language from your ELD document packet, keep the transfer instruction sheet, confirm that your DVIR process is documented, whether it’s paper or electronic, and update your procedure for returning inspection reports to reflect which states still require them. Anyone relying on the new equipment exceptions should keep a copy of the applicable final rule with the equipment file. Training providers should start their audit file before the audit exists. ELD vendors on the thin end of the registry should read AD00 as their own future.

The longer-term posture is different. Comment periods are the only point where an operator’s field experience enters the record, the dockets live at regulations.gov, and an agenda date is a promise the way a broker’s rate confirmation is a promise. The rules that matter here have been coming since 2009. What’s new is that the courts, the fraud, the data, and now the highway bill have all arrived at the same conclusion at the same time, and the agency is writing under pressure it didn’t have the last three times it tried.