In 2020, the federal government wired $2.35 billion in disaster loans to insured motor carriers, and it kept wiring as freight entered the most profitable stretch in its history. Match the SBA’s loan data against FMCSA’s insurance filings, and a pattern fell out: $79.6 million to RRG paper, 12 loans during a liquidation, and 1 carrier approved for $150,000 two days before its dead insurer’s filing lapsed.
In the spring and summer of 2020, the federal government wired $2.35 billion in COVID disaster loans to federally registered motor carriers. I matched the SBA’s own bulk loan data against FMCSA’s insurance filings, carrier by carrier, name by name, state by state. Here is what fell out.
The Economic Injury Disaster Loan program was designed to keep genuinely injured businesses alive, and in March, April, and May of 2020, many passenger businesses were. Motorcoach and limousine operators, who show up all over this data with the largest loans, watched their entire industry stop existing in a week. A charter bus company taking $500,000 in April 2020 is not a scandal. It’s the program doing what Congress built it to do. No one was traveling, and passenger carriers were dying in mass-casualty financial events.
Meanwhile, the freight market was printing money. By June 2020, spot rates were fine, and by the fall the industry was entering the most profitable stretch small trucking had ever seen. Rates went vertical and stayed there for eighteen months. The loans kept flowing.
My investigation matched 27,923 insured motor carriers to SBA EIDL disbursements totaling $2.35 billion. The method used exact legal-name matches, confirmed against the carrier’s physical state, and limited to insured entities. The true number is higher. This is our base.
Sort that money by the type of insurance paper the recipients ran on, because in trucking, the paper tells you which carrier the recipient is. It also tells you whether the carrier is open.
$79.6 million to the shadow market
Regular readers know the argument from my earlier reporting: risk retention groups are single-state-chartered insurers that write trucking liability nationwide under a 1986 federal preemption, hold whatever capital their domicile tolerates, and federal statute bars them from every state guaranty fund in America. When one fails, and they fail, the crash victims get nothing. I documented 76 of them, insuring roughly 29,000 carriers earlier this year.
Cross that shadow market against the COVID loan data, and you get this: 1,086 carriers running on RRG paper collected $79.6 million in EIDL money.
Some of that is defensible. The biggest single book belongs to one RRG run by a national association comprising 235 carriers, $12.3 million. Owner-operators were exactly the businesses the early-2020 market genuinely hurt, and this RRG is the oldest and most legitimate operation in the category. While they may be the oldest and most legitimate, not all are. Two points to make here. 1. That association’s leadership has testified to legislative committees at least 6 times, demanding no increase in federal insurance minimums. 2. Their COO sits on the NRRA Board of Directors as Secretary. When testimony arrives on Capitol Hill, check a layer or two beyond the surface, and you usually find a reason or two guiding it. NRRA openly credits this association with killing the minimum insurance increase. Their own marketing material says that when federal policymakers proposed raising the minimum liability requirement to $4.5 million per truck, said association “led the charge in Washington, D.C.” and successfully blocked the change, holding the association up as a template of RRG success.
Hold two major Association positions side by side and see who stands under both. Position one: the insurance minimum must stay at $750,000, a figure set in 1980, because raising it would crush small carriers. Position two: aggressively enforce English proficiency, which said association championed and, in June 2025, became an out-of-service offense. Now run the data. Carriers insured by risk retention groups draw English proficiency citations at a rate 38% higher per inspection than the rest of the entire US trucking fleet. Your foreign-driven fleets comprise non-English-proficient RRG-insured fleets. The same carriers, in other words. The RRG sector’s client base is the population that the low minimum protects and the population that the ELP campaign removes from the road. Fight to keep their insurance cheap, fight to take their drivers out of service, and the two positions only look contradictory until you notice what they share: in both, the carrier keeps buying the policy right up until the roadside inspection ends the trip. The premium clears either way. Whatever else it is, it is not the voice of the small trucker. It is the voice of the paper.
While the association demands a static, aged insurance minimum and demands the same insureds be removed for ELP and non-domiciled enforcement, they are, as far as anyone knows, a legitimate RRG; not all of them are. What follows is different.
Universal Casualty Risk Retention Group, an insurer whose book I have reported on at length in connection with a multistate carrier network now in federal litigation, shows 108 carriers matched to $11.05 million in disaster loans. Then there is County Hall.
The Spirit lineage collects federal money
If you read my RRG article a few months back, you know the chain. Federal Motor Carriers Risk Retention Group was liquidated in 2011. The man regulators identified as controlling it through its program manager then stood up Spirit Commercial Auto RRG in Nevada in 2012. Spirit collapsed in 2019 with roughly $199 million in unpaid losses against $42 million in assets, a forensic audit that found at least $30 million missing, and a state complaint calling the whole arrangement a vast fraudulent enterprise. Those are the Nevada Insurance Commissioner’s allegations, and the case is still in litigation. While Spirit was still writing, a third RRG appeared in North Carolina with ties to the same network: County Hall.
County Hall’s insured carriers collected $6.57 million in EIDL loans across 78 matched carriers.
A lineage of three risk retention groups, two of them liquidated, the third formed while the second was being looted according to state regulators, and the surviving vehicle’s book of trucking clients was drawing federal disaster money through the same season the receivers were still counting what was missing from the last one. No system flagged any of it. The SBA saw an insured motor carrier. FMCSA saw a filing. Nobody saw the pattern. SBA and FMCSA didn’t connect until I merged them; neither did Interpol RED or other watchlists.
One name on the dead-book Spirit casualty list connects this story to another. MGR Freight System, a carrier I have reported on in connection with the Super Ego network, sits near the top of Spirit Commercial Auto RRG’s book by fatal crashes: six fatal wrecks and 160 total in the record, insured by an RRG that collapsed, owing $199 million it did not have. When Spirit died, MGR did not leave the shadow market. It moved to MS Transverse Specialty and kept running.
Twelve loans during a liquidation
Vermont regulators seized Global Hawk Risk Retention Group in the spring of 2020. Its filings claimed $42.7 million in assets; the banks held $609,489. The court’s liquidation order, entered June 8, 2020, said the 1,008 trucks it covered were effectively uninsured. Its president, Jasbir Thandi, later pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges for wiring the money away.
In the data, twelve EIDL disbursements totaling $649,200 went to carriers whose insurance filing of record was Global Hawk. All twelve were approved between June 5 and September 4, 2020. During and after the liquidation.
A carrier called Impossible Express Lanes LLC shows a Global Hawk policy effective March 17, 2020, riding that paper straight through the collapse. On September 4, 2020, the SBA approved it for $150,000. Its Global Hawk filing lapsed two days later. Federal disaster money, approved to a carrier insured by a corpse, two days before the paperwork showed it.
At scale, across their lifetimes, just those three dead RRGs, Federal Motor Carriers, Spirit, and Global Hawk, wrote paper for 21,035 different motor carriers in the federal filing data. That is the universe of policies insurers sold without a guaranty fund that no longer exist. Every claim in that universe that matured after the collapse was included in the liquidation estate rather than paid.
The carriers those dead insurers wrote paper for, 19,588 of them across Federal Motor Carriers, Spirit, and Global Hawk, ran up 49,812 crashes in the record, 1,479 of them fatal, 1,972 people dead, 23,519 injured. Every one of those policies was sold with no guaranty fund behind it. Sixty of those carriers managed to be insured by all three companies in turn, riding one collapsing RRG into the next, and at no point did the system that let them buy the first policy stop them from buying the third.
The suite in Sheridan, Wyoming
One more thing the data coughed up, which tells you how thin the whole verification layer is.
A suite at 30 N Gould Street in Sheridan, Wyoming. It is a registered agent’s address, a legal mail drop; using one is lawful. At that address, FMCSA data show 95 registered motor carriers on file. The SBA’s loan data show 115 EIDL recipients at the same address, totaling more than $5.1 million to one mailbox, and most of the recipients are not trucking companies. They are e-commerce shells, crypto consultancies, supplement brands, an outfit called American Pillowcase, suite numbers stacked on suite numbers, none of them with a truck.
Two federal systems, FMCSA registration and SBA disaster lending, both accepted the same empty suite in Wyoming as a place where businesses exist. The carriers and the pillowcase company passed through the same door because the door checks nothing. That is not a trucking scandal or a Wyoming scandal. It is what the entire federal verification layer looks like when you find the single address where it all piles up.
Same filing cabinet, equally blind
The pattern across everything above is not sophisticated fraud. It is the absence of a requirement to check.
The SBA’s automated system accepted a DOT number, an MC number, and an insurance certificate as proof of a real transportation business, and never asked whether the insurer behind the certificate was solvent, or seized, or the third company in a documented insolvency chain. FMCSA accepts the insurance filing as proof of financial responsibility and never asks who filed it; in its records today, a filing from a twice-failed operator’s successor RRG counts the same as a filing from a century-old admitted carrier. FMCSA numbers show 34% of actively insured carriers, 71,953 of them, sitting on paper classification flags as non-underwritten, and the carriers on RRG paper run a 16% higher crash count per carrier than everyone else, on books that skew toward small fleets that should crash less.
Congress is currently being told the data doesn’t exist to evaluate whether motor carrier insurance requirements are adequate. The data exists. It’s public. Matching takes a database and the willingness to look. What does not exist, anywhere in the federal government, is a single place where the insurance filing, the loan record, the crash file, and the corporate registration are read together. Until that desk exists, the worst carriers will keep running on the worst paper, and when the government hands out easy money, that paper will be first in line.
EIDL records from the SBA’s public DATA Act bulk release (2.77 million rows) matched against FMCSA Licensing and Insurance filings and the FMCSA carrier census (2.2 million carriers) in the TEA Intel database. Matching used an exact legal-name comparison after standard suffix normalization, confirmed against the carrier’s physical state of record; the method undercounts by design, so all totals are floor values. Insurer classification follows the insurer taxonomy; we verified RRG identification against the platform’s RRG profile set. Loan presence does not indicate wrongdoing by any individual recipient; the SBA makes eligibility determinations. Full match table available on request.