THE DAILY

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

The ten minutes that make you the most informed person in freight today

The Daily

CDL fraud wasn’t a loophole. It was the policy. Now 550 schools face removal from the federal registry.

The Entry-Level Driver Training rule was supposed to clean up the CDL pipeline. Industry lobbying gutted it before it ever took effect, and for three years, the result has been exactly what critics predicted.

When ELDT became law in February 2022, it carried a federal requirement Congress specifically ordered: a minimum training floor. By the time the final rule cleared the lobbying process, that floor had been removed. What remained was a Training Provider Registry that FMCSA staffs on an honor system: providers fill out an online form, and the agency doesn’t verify the location, the instructors, or whether there’s a truck on the property. The result is fraudulent CDL mills have operated inside the national registry for years, producing licensed drivers with no meaningful preparation to handle an 80,000-pound vehicle at highway speed.

The February 2026 enforcement sweep made the scale of the failure impossible to ignore. Secretary Duffy sent more than 300 investigators into all 50 states, conducting 1,426 on-site operations. They found 550 schools in violation of FMCSA standards; providers using unqualified instructors, improper vehicles, and failing to test students at all. Some admitted they didn’t meet their own state’s requirements. The result was the largest enforcement action against CDL training fraud in the history of the program, and the administration announced rulemakings to address the structural gaps that made it possible.

The training deterioration runs deeper than the mills. A community college program that ran 320 hours in 1992 has been cut to 120 hours today: three weeks, first day and a half in a classroom, automatic transmission, and a third-party examiner. The shift to automatics has compounded the problem. Less than a decade ago, roughly 10% of heavy-duty trucks were equipped with automatics; today, that number exceeds 95% of new Class 8 production. The manual transmission requirement functioned as a competency filter. Without it, drivers who couldn’t manage a stick are now licensed to operate equipment they’re not equipped to handle in emergencies like jackknife recovery or mountain grade management.

So What? This story connects directly to the Alabama crash covered below — and to the Indiana Amish crash that killed four people in February. The pattern is systemic: a fraudulent training provider, a carrier that doesn’t vet its drivers, a broker that doesn’t ask questions, and a regulatory architecture that created the conditions for all of it. The enforcement sweep is a genuine step forward, but rulemaking takes time. The 200,000 FMCSA estimates are currently illegal commercial drivers on American roads — they’re there now.

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Top Stories

States that fail to assess their truck parking shortage will lose access to federal highway freight funds

New DOT guidance makes truck parking a condition of National Highway Freight Program funding: any state without a State Freight Plan that includes a comprehensive parking assessment can’t obligate NHFP money until it’s in compliance. The stakes are real: Congress earmarked a record $200 million exclusively for truck parking in the 2026 spending bill, the first time the funding has ever been line-itemed at that scale. The money can’t be used for EV charging or fueling infrastructure; it has to go to free commercial vehicle parking near the Interstate or National Highway Freight Network. OOIDA’s Todd Spencer puts the current shortage at one space for every 11 trucks on the road, and a DOT study found 98% of drivers regularly can’t find a safe place to stop. The average driver loses 56 minutes of driving time per day searching for parking, amounting to roughly $6,813 in lost wages annually.

So What? States that haven’t updated their freight plans are now on a clock. For carriers, the funding signals a multi-year expansion of publicly available parking — but the shortage is severe enough that even $200 million won’t close the gap quickly. Driver recruiting and retention teams should track where construction projects are landing; parking access is a real-world factor in whether an owner-operator chooses your freight.

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The driver behind the 10-fatality Alabama crash formed his own trucking company. He’s still hauling loads.

On June 19, 2021, a Tallapoosa County Girls Ranch van carrying eight children was struck on Interstate 65 near Greenville, Ala., hit again by a second truck and pushed into the median, then consumed by fire. Ten people died. The carrier involved, Asmat Express, offered no driver training of any kind (the NTSB noted this explicitly). FMCSA issued an unsatisfactory rating and an out-of-service order in September 2021. Nineteen days later, after a corrective action plan was submitted, the order was rescinded. Asmat never resumed operations. The driver at the center of the crash, with a documented record of prior incidents and hours-of-service violations in the days before the wreck, has since obtained his own DOT number and is operating under someone else’s authority. He is still crashing.

So What? This is the chameleon carrier problem in its clearest form. You shut one entity down; the driver reappears under a new DOT number with a new authority. FMCSA estimates approximately 200,000 illegal or unqualified commercial drivers are on American roads. The enforcement tools exist — the agency pulled roughly 2,000 unqualified drivers in a three-day sweep across 26 states in January. The question is whether any structural fix prevents the reappearance. So far, the answer is no.

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Panama physically seized the CK Hutchison terminals today. Maersk takes the Pacific side. MSC takes the Atlantic.

Panamanian authorities made direct physical entry into the Balboa and Cristobal terminals on Monday, seizing administrative and operational control of both facilities and barring CK Hutchison representatives from the property. APM Terminals, the Maersk unit, steps in at Balboa on the Pacific side. MSC’s Terminal Investment takes Cristobal on the Atlantic. The action follows a Jan. 29 ruling by Panama’s Supreme Court invalidating Hutchison’s concession as unconstitutional, and it ends more than 30 years of Hong Kong-linked management at the canal’s key gateway ports. Hutchison’s previously agreed $23 billion sale of its global port assets to BlackRock and MSC — which included the Panama terminals — had been blocked by Beijing, which demanded a controlling stake for state carrier Cosco. China has warned Panama of a "heavy price" both politically and economically.

So What? The immediate operational risk is transition chaos — Hutchison says Panama didn’t consult it and cited safety concerns for workers at both terminals. Shippers with cargo moving through Balboa or Cristobal should monitor for congestion and vessel delays as Maersk and MSC establish command. The longer read: China’s leverage over a critical U.S. trade corridor has been formally dismantled, and the administration will claim this as a win. The arbitration proceedings Hutchison filed in Paris will play out over years.

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Velocity Vehicles gets its second debt downgrade in three months. Moody’s cuts it to B3: three notches in under a year.

Moody’s cut Velocity Vehicle Group two notches to B3, matching S&P Global’s B- rating, which the agency assigned in December after its own two-notch reduction. Both ratings now sit six notches below the investment-grade cutoff. Moody’s cited persistent softness in freight transportation volumes, driven in part by tariff-induced caution on fleet updates, and expects demand for new trucks, used trucks, leased equipment, and maintenance services to remain under pressure through 2026. Moody’s changed its outlook to stable; S&P’s remains negative. In under 12 months, Velocity Vehicles has burned through three notches of Moody’s credit quality, from Ba3 to B3. S&P projects the company will remain cash-flow-positive, forecasting free operating cash flow above $40 million in 2026.

So What? The Velocity Vehicles story is a barometer for the commercial truck market. Dealers and lessors this deep in the credit stack face tighter borrowing costs and less flexibility on inventory. Fleet replacement cycles that were already extended by the freight recession are getting pushed out further by tariff uncertainty. If you’re watching for a demand recovery signal in Class 8 equipment, this downgrade says the market hasn’t sent it yet.

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From the Research Desk

What We’re Watching

▸ FMCSA’s proposed ELDT rulemakings. The February sweep named 550 schools for removal, but the structural gap — no minimum training hours, a self-certification registry, 50 different state standards — requires a rulemaking to fix. Watch for the administration’s proposed rule timeline; this is where the real enforcement fight plays out.

▸ Panama Canal transition operations at Balboa and Cristobal. Maersk’s APM Terminals and MSC’s TIL are now in command of both gateways, but Hutchison’s arbitration filing in Paris means legal uncertainty isn’t going away. Watch for vessel scheduling disruptions and any signal from Beijing on retaliatory trade measures against Panama.

▸ Class 8 equipment demand through Q2. The Velocity Vehicles downgrade is the latest data point in an extended weak cycle for truck dealers and lessors. If freight volumes don’t recover meaningfully by mid-year, expect more credit pressure across the equipment finance sector. The tariff variable makes the demand timeline hard to call.

That’s your Daily for today. See you tomorrow.

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