Combating Organized Retail Crime Act Is Last Freight Bill Standing

The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act (CORCA), H.R. 2853, is the only freight-related bill with a realistic path to passage before the 119th Congress expires at noon on Jan. 3, 2027. The bill passed the House 348-60 on May 12 and has been in the Senate Judiciary Committee since. It creates a federal coordination center to combat organized cargo theft.

What does CORCA do for carriers fighting cargo theft?

CORCA establishes a federal coordination center to help carriers and brokers fight the organized networks behind cargo theft. The bill does not mandate equipment or touch CDL eligibility. It has support in both parties. If the Senate wants one win for freight before January, this is it.

Cargo theft is one of the few freight problems both parties agree on. The bill would give carriers and brokers a federal partner against the networks hitting them hardest. Compromised carrier emails accounted for 40% of stolen loads in Q3 2026, according to Highway's fraud report.

What happens to the rest of the trucking bills on Jan. 3?

Every bill in Congress has an expiration date. For the 119th Congress, it's noon on Jan. 3, 2027. Anything that hasn't passed both chambers and reached the president by then dies. The next Congress starts over with new bill numbers, new committee chairs, and new math.

After the November election, Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate. Rep. Rick Larsen of Washington, the ranking Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is expected to take the gavel from retiring Chairman Sam Graves. Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington is in line to replace Ted Cruz as chair of Senate Commerce, the committee that oversees FMCSA on the Senate side.

In September, 79 trucking bills had been introduced across the last two Congresses. Three became law. Of the rest, 69 never left committee. The biggest enforcement change Congress made in that window, ordering DOT to treat a failed English proficiency check as an out-of-service violation, didn't come from any of the 79. It came from a paragraph in the spending law that ended the shutdown in February.

Stand-alone trucking bills don't move. Bills that have to pass do.

What's in the December continuing resolution deadline?

The government and the federal highway program are both funded through Dec. 11 under the continuing resolution signed Sept. 2. That deadline is the only vehicle left in this Congress. Truckload Carriers Association President Jim Mullen expects lawmakers to pass a fairly clean highway extension running into June and leave the real highway bill to the new Congress.

The BUILD America 250 Act, H.R. 8870, cleared the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee 62-2 on May 22 and never reached the floor. It carries $750 million over five years for truck parking, directs DOT to write a rule prohibiting predatory lease-purchase programs, requires a disclosure form showing how many drivers actually end up owning their trucks, targets chameleon carriers, and creates a rulemaking committee on minimum knowledge requirements for new carriers. It dies Jan. 3.

Mullen expects the parking money to carry into the next version. An effort to raise the $750,000 minimum insurance requirement was stripped from this year's bill, and Mullen expects it back. Under a Democratic chairman, expect the lease-purchase language to return and get pushed harder.

What happens to Dalilah's Law?

Dalilah's Law, H.R. 5688, cleared the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee 35-26 on a party-line vote March 18 and has waited for a House vote ever since. Its Senate companion, S. 3917, never got a hearing. It dies Jan. 3 and won't come back in its current form.

Larsen called the English proficiency section redundant in March, and Democrats objected that the non-domiciled limits could bar DACA recipients from ever driving. Mullen expects the next highway bill to handle non-domiciled drivers differently, possibly letting DACA recipients keep their credentials.

The bipartisan pieces of Dalilah's Law, banning foreign-based brokers and offshore dispatch services that feed double brokering and load theft, and fixing self-certification on the Training Provider Registry so a CDL mill can't certify itself, are both fraud fixes, not immigration policy. Both were in the committee's bill. Those pieces could ride the December extension if the Senate wants them.

Which bills are worth refiling in the next Congress?

The fraud and identity bills are the strongest candidates for bipartisan support. Barron's Law, H.R. 10620, belongs here for its non-immigration sections: a $25,000 fine for knowingly using an ineligible driver, a ban on registering any carrier revoked in the past three years, and a $25,000 fine for hiding a relationship or using a successor company to dodge a sanction. That's the chameleon carrier fix in plain language.

The group also includes the House and Senate SAFE Act bills on carrier registration screening, the GHOSTRUCK Act, and Sen. Ashley Moody's Staged Accident Fraud Prevention Act, which would make intentionally causing a crash with a commercial truck a federal crime. Those are the bills to strip of anything partisan and refile in January.

The driver pay and workforce bills get a better shot under Democrats. The Guaranteeing Overtime for Truckers Act already has sponsors from both parties. Rep. Julia Brownley's Predatory Truck Leasing Prevention Act lines up with the lease-purchase language already in the highway bill. Expect both to come back with more cosponsors.

The CDL eligibility bills mostly lose their path. That group includes the versions of Dalilah's Law, Connor's Law (whose English proficiency language was folded into Dalilah's Law), the SAFE Driving Laws Act, the No CDLs for Illegals Act, and the Secure Commercial Driver Licensing Act. Under a Democratic House, the immigration pieces of these bills won't come back as written.

Why executive action doesn't stick like statute

Almost everything that changed on the road in the last 18 months is executive action, not law. Executive action lasts only until the next court ruling or the next administration.

Take English proficiency. The requirement has been in 49 CFR 391.11(b)(2) (Code of Federal Regulations, Title 49, Section 391.11(b)(2)) for decades. In 2016, an FMCSA policy memo told inspectors not to put drivers out of service for it. An April 2025 executive order and a new memo reversed that, effective June 25, 2025. By August, DOT said inspectors had issued more than 26,000 out-of-service orders for it.

One memo turned enforcement off. Another turned it back on. The February spending law ordered DOT to put the out-of-service consequence into regulation. FMCSA proposed that rule Aug. 10, and comments closed Oct. 10. Until the rule is final, the biggest roadside enforcement change in a decade still rests on guidance.

The non-domiciled CDL rule is further along and more exposed. FMCSA's final rule took effect March 16 and is expected to make about 200,000 drivers ineligible as their licenses expire. A divided D.C. Circuit panel refused to stay it in May, but the same court heard the merits Sept. 15, and as of early November it hadn't ruled. When it stayed the earlier interim version last November, the court noted that non-domiciled drivers were about 5% of CDL holders and about 0.2% of fatal crashes in the data FMCSA cited.

A rule survives or falls on whether the agency followed the Administrative Procedure Act and showed its work. A statute survives or falls on whether Congress had the power to pass it. That's why the industry wanted Dalilah's Law, and that's the protection the policy loses on Jan. 3.

What fraud enforcement loses without statute

Fraud enforcement has the same weakness. In May 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14294, which discourages criminal enforcement of regulatory offenses and tells agencies to weigh factors like the harm caused before referring a violation to the Justice Department. For a trucker who missed a paperwork deadline, that's fair. But CDL mills, falsified logs, shut-down carriers reopening under new names, and USDOT numbers sold online aren't paperwork mistakes.

FMCSA warned in March that it would revoke registrations for anyone buying, selling, or leasing a USDOT number outside a legitimate transaction. A revocation isn't a prison sentence. If Congress wants fraud networks treated as crimes, it has to say so in statute, with the intent standard written in, so no executive order can soften it.

Emissions shows the same weakness from the other direction. On Jan. 21, the Justice Department said it would use its enforcement discretion to stop bringing criminal charges under the Clean Air Act for tampering with onboard diagnostic devices. CBS News reported that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche's memo also ordered prosecutors to drop pending defeat device cases. The Clean Air Act's tampering ban and its criminal penalties are still in the statute. The general federal statute of limitations is five years, so a delete done in 2026 is chargeable until 2031, and a future Justice Department can rescind the Blanche memo on its first day.

Memos let an agency move fast. Rules make the change stick. Statutes keep the change in place after the people who wrote it are gone. Right now, trucking safety is running mostly on the first two.

What small fleets should push for in the Dec. 11 bill

The short list has to ride the Dec. 11 bill or pass by unanimous consent in a lame-duck Senate. Here's what to push, in order of what can actually get done.

Pass CORCA in the Senate. It cleared the House 348-60. The bill would give carriers and brokers a federal partner against the networks behind organized cargo theft.

Fund the people who do the inspections. Whatever the December bill looks like, it has to keep Motor Carrier Safety Assistance Program (MCSAP) grants to the states whole. Another short stopgap that leaves state enforcement budgets guessing is the opposite of a safety policy.

Put the bipartisan pieces of Dalilah's Law in the extension. Not the immigration provisions. The pieces nobody voted against on the merits: banning foreign-based brokers and offshore dispatch services that feed double brokering and load theft, and fixing self-certification on the Training Provider Registry so a CDL mill can't certify itself. Both are fraud fixes, not immigration policy.

Mullen expects a clean extension with no riders, and a lame-duck Congress that just lost both chambers has little reason to give the incoming majority a win or take a hard vote. If none of this happens, it isn't the end of the world. It's the start of a harder year.

What changes under the new committee chairs

The highway bill gets rewritten under Larsen and Cantwell. That isn't automatically bad for safety. Larsen co-wrote the bill that cleared committee 62-2, and the American Trucking Associations said the highway bill is a chance to show divided government doesn't have to mean dysfunctional government.

What changes is the balance. Expect more on lease-purchase, insurance minimums, and driver protections, less on English proficiency, and a different approach to non-domiciled licensing. The industry has 60 days to get CORCA across the finish line and secure MCSAP funding in the December bill. After that, the fight moves to the new Congress with new math.