Congress Passed 3 Trucking Laws in Four Years, None Added Enforcement

What trucking legislation did Congress actually pass in the last four years?

Congress introduced 79 trucking bills across the 118th and 119th sessions (2023 through mid-2026). Three became law. Two are CDL housekeeping measures: the Veteran Improvement Commercial Driver License Act, which eases the path for veterans to get their CDLs, and the Strengthening the Commercial Driver's License Information System Act, a data-plumbing upgrade to the system states use to share driver records. The third is a Congressional Review Act resolution striking down California's Advanced Clean Trucks rules. None of the three added enforcement capacity, funded inspections, or tightened carrier oversight.

The 76 that didn't pass tell the rest of the story. Sixty-nine died the week they were introduced, referred to committee and never touched again. Five fought through committee, got reported to the House calendar, and died sitting on it. Two of those five are bills the industry has spent years asking for: the Motor Carrier Safety Selection Standard Act, which would have created a national standard for vetting carriers before hiring them (the question the Supreme Court made urgent for every broker in Montgomery v. Caribe), and the Truck Parking Safety Improvement Act, the top quality-of-life ask in nearly every driver survey. Both reported out of committee. Both placed on the calendar. Both died.

Who introduced the 79 bills?

In the House, Rep. Tracey Mann of Kansas put his name on 12 trucking bills, Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas (a former sheriff whose district sits on the Houston freight corridor) on 11, Rep. Rudy Yakym of Indiana on 10, and Rep. Chris Pappas of New Hampshire, the leading Democrat, on 9. On the Senate side, Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska stands out as the chamber's most prolific author of trucking legislation, with Wyoming's Cynthia Lummis and Michigan's Gary Peters among the most active.

The geography matters: Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Indiana, New Hampshire. Freight-corridor and agricultural states, mostly, whose members live with trucking whether they chose the issue or not. Legislative attention tracks freight geography, but it does not track the burden.

What did the committee chairmen do?

The House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure owns trucking. Every one of the 79 bills that touched the House passed through its jurisdiction. Its chairman is Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri. Number of trucking bills Sam Graves put his name on across the past two Congresses: zero. The committee's top Democrat, ranking member Rick Larsen of Washington: zero. The two most powerful people in the House on trucking policy, with decades of combined service on the committee, did not sponsor or cosponsor a single one of the 79.

Chairmen traditionally don't cosponsor: a chairman's power is the gavel, not the signature. Graves' committee moved several bills to markup, and some made it to the calendar. But the two bills the industry wanted most died on a calendar the majority controls. Down at the subcommittee level, Highways and Transit chairman David Rouzer has 4 bills, and ranking member Eleanor Holmes Norton has 2 (Norton, as the delegate from the District of Columbia, doesn't hold a floor vote).

How does legislative activity match crash burden by state?

Texas lost 323 people to truck crashes in fiscal 2025, the bleakest column in federal crash data. Texas is also the most legislatively active delegation in the country: 21 of its 38 House members put their name on trucking legislation, 60 sponsorships in all, plus Nehls near the top of the individual table. Texas shows up.

Virginia lost 104 people to truck crashes in fiscal 2025. Virginia runs the most expensive inspections among big states ($424 apiece, according to federal enforcement data published this week) and one of the thinnest programs (26,259 inspections all year). Put those together, and Virginia has the worst enforcement coverage ratio in America: nearly one crash on its books for every five inspections it performs. California, for comparison, runs 45 inspections per crash. Virginia's legislative response to being the most under-inspected freight state in the nation: 16 sponsorships from a delegation of 11, none of them among the House leaders.

Georgia runs it close: 188 deaths, the second-worst coverage ratio at one crash per seven inspections, middling legislative activity. At the far end sits Hawaii, the only state whose entire congressional delegation, House and Senate, put their name on zero trucking bills across two Congresses. Fifteen truck crash deaths in fiscal 2025 and not one signature. Hawaii's freight profile is unusual (an island economy with no interstate trucking in the mainland sense), but it is still a zero, and Hawaiians still buried 15 people.

The states where the crash-to-inspection math is most broken (Virginia, Georgia, the coverage-gap states) are legislatively unremarkable. The enforcement war consuming the industry (Enhanced Licensing Program, state funding withholdings) is being fought entirely by the executive branch, while the legislative branch produced two CDL housekeeping laws and a deregulation in four years.

What does this mean for carriers waiting on federal action?

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy spent nine years in Congress (2011 to 2019) and put his name on roughly 820 pieces of legislation. Four involved trucking: a clarification of the agricultural exemption from hours-of-service rules, the Drug-Free Commercial Driver Act (backed twice, the hair-testing recognition bill), and the Safe, Flexible, and Efficient Trucking Act of 2015 (the bill to put heavier trucks on the interstate). All four died in the same place: referred to the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit, never heard from again.

Duffy is now the most aggressive enforcement executive in FMCSA's history, withholding hundreds of millions of dollars from states for not enforcing hard enough. The pattern is clear: the enforcement lever doesn't require Congress. When the people demanding enforcement held the pen across two Congresses, they produced 79 attempts, three laws, and none of them enforcement. The bills that would have mattered most died on a calendar.

Carriers waiting for Congress to pass national carrier vetting standards after Montgomery or federal truck parking funding should adjust expectations accordingly. The legislative branch has been mostly idle for four years. The executive branch is not.

Where the data came from

Every bill introduced in the 118th and 119th Congress (36,608 in total) was screened against a tight set of trucking terms: motor carrier, CDL (Commercial Driver's License), hours of service, FMCSA (Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration), and the like. That yielded the 79. Sponsorship and cosponsorship for all 79 came from the Congress.gov API. Committee assignments came from the Congress-legislators public dataset. Secretary Duffy's full nine-year record (all 820 bills) came from his member file. Crash and enforcement figures are the same audited dataset published in yesterday's state enforcement rankings: deduplicated federal crash records and 2.9 million fiscal 2025 inspections.

Two limits: this ledger counts names on bills, not votes. A member can vote for every trucking measure that reaches the floor and never cosponsor one, though almost nothing reached the floor for a vote. Sponsorship counts measure attention, not quality. One good bill outweighs ten messaging bills, which is why the bills are named here, not just tallied.