Who owns the trucking and highway safety mess?

Everyone wants to blame this administration and ask if Trump, Duffy and Barrs are doing enough. Data says they're doing more than anyone else and the bad actors were already here.

Everyone wants to blame this administration and ask if Trump, Duffy, and Barrs are doing enough. The data says they’re doing more than anyone else, and the bad actors were already here.

Nearly nine out of ten of the most suspicious motor carriers in the federal registry were already there when President Trump took office in January 2025. That is what the registration data shows for 95,503 carriers flagged for sharing three or more identifiers with other trucking companies. The shared identifiers include vehicle identification numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, company officers, and physical addresses. In fraud detection work, those overlaps are the fingerprints of chameleon carriers, ghost fleets, and authority resale schemes, the same schemes federal regulators have spent the past year promising to root out.

The administration has framed trucking fraud as a problem flowing into the country right now, something it inherited at the border and is actively shutting off. Critics of the administration argue the opposite, that the problem is being manufactured or imported on its watch. The registry tells the data story.

Of the carriers with the heaviest identifier crossover, 87.1% registered with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration before January 2025. Fifty-nine percent registered before January 2021, which means they predate the Biden administration too. These are not new arrivals. The average carrier in this group has sat in the federal registry through multiple administrations, multiple FMCSA administrators, and multiple rounds of promised crackdowns.

The 2021 surge is real

If there is one era that stands out, it is the pandemic authority boom. Carriers that registered during the Biden administration make up 28.2% of the worst-crossover group, the largest single share of any administration. That is against a baseline of 22% for all carriers in the registry. Put another way, Biden-era registrants show up in the fraud-signal population at 1.28 times the rate you would expect from their share of the industry.

Anyone who watched FMCSA grant record numbers of new operating authorities in 2021 and 2022, when spot rates were screaming, and a used Freightliner was a business plan, will not be surprised. The front door was wide open, and the line was long. Some of what walked through was not what it claimed to be.

Trump-era registrants are overrepresented at almost the same rate. Carriers that entered during the first Trump administration show up at 1.23 times their baseline share. Carriers that have entered since January 2025 show up at 1.24 times. The overrepresentation is not a Biden phenomenon. It is a new-authority phenomenon. Fraudulent carriers are born recently by definition, because reincarnation only works with a fresh identity, and the oldest cohorts look cleaner partly because their bad actors were revoked and purged years ago. We have a Northern VA carrier that was shut down with two owners, an address, email, and phone, and reopened seven years later with a new name while everything else remained the same.

12,277 carriers with three or more crossover signals have registered since January 2025. Roughly one in eight of the worst carriers in the data walked in the front door in the past 18 months.

Who is getting enforced?

Registration is half the story. Revocation is the other half. Since January 2025, FMCSA has revoked operating authority for 3,140 carriers in this group for the first time. Of those, 2,656, or 84.6%, registered under previous administrations. The current administration’s own enforcement record shows it is mostly mopping up carriers it inherited, which is exactly what you would expect when 87% of the problem predates you.

In fairness, the mopping is faster. The Biden administration revoked 4,689 of these carriers over four years, roughly 1,170 per year. The current pace works out to roughly 2,400 per year through May 2026. The enforcement machine is running about twice as hard against this population as it did in the prior term. Both things are true at once. The crackdown is real, and what it is cracking down on was already here.

Of the 95,503 carriers in this group, 80,513, or 84.3%, have never had an authority revocation. Fewer than 5% ever received an out-of-service order under the New Entrant Safety Assurance Program, the screening process designed to catch exactly this profile in a carrier’s first 18 months. The program that is supposed to be the filter caught one in twenty.

Carriers that entered during the Biden boom and eventually got revoked lasted an average of 639 days before FMCSA pulled their authority. That is 21 months, comfortably past the new entrant window. They did not slip through a crack but instead walked through the front door, aged out of the only mandatory screening program, and operated until something else caught them.

One more detail from deep in the data. At least 53 carriers in this group hold USDOT numbers that FMCSA did not begin issuing until after 2011, yet they carry operating authority revocations served in the 1980s and 1990s. A DOT number cannot be revoked before it exists. The only way those records connect is through the docket, meaning the operating authority died under one identity and now sits on a company registered years later. The reincarnation pattern is visible in the government’s own tables, if anyone cares to look.

What the data doesn’t say

This analysis does not identify individual carriers as fraudulent. Sharing a VIN or an address with another carrier can have legitimate explanations, including equipment leasing, family businesses, and registered agent addresses. Some of the highest-crossover records in the data are almost certainly leasing operations whose equipment lawfully appears under many customer DOT numbers. The three-signal threshold exists to filter coincidence, not to convict anyone.

What the data does say is simple. The population of carriers that fits the fraud profile was built over 20 years, under every administration, through a registration system that asks few questions and a new entrant program that answers almost none. Whoever holds the White House inherits it. The current administration inherited 87% of it and is revoking it faster than its predecessor did. The problem was not imported. It was licensed, one USDOT number at a time, mostly under non-Trump administrations. Arguably, there has never been a more active administration when it comes to enforcement and barriers to entry. That's just the data-backed facts.