Trump Pardons 11 Diesel Tuners, Ending Federal Tampering Prosecutions

Will the EPA restart criminal prosecutions after the next election?

President Trump signed full pardons July 3 for 11 diesel mechanics and tuners convicted of selling or installing devices that bypass federally required emissions controls. The pardons close out one of the most aggressive federal enforcement campaigns in trucking history, but the underlying Clean Air Act remains unchanged, and civil penalties of $45,268 per tampered engine stay on the books.

The pardon list includes Ryan and Wade LaLone of Diesel Freak LLC in Gaylord, Michigan, who each served one-year probation after federal prosecutors charged them in 2023 as part of a sweep that also pulled in Accurate Truck Service and nine other individuals. Matt Geouge, whose two companies grossed more than $10 million from the sale of illegal tuning devices according to his December 2021 plea agreement, also received clemency. Troy Lake, the Wyoming mechanic convicted of directing employees to disable onboard diagnostics on at least 344 heavy trucks between 2017 and 2020, was pardoned in November 2025 after serving time at FCI Florence, where the Bureau of Prisons assigned him to the prison diesel shop.

In January 2026, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche ordered federal prosecutors to drop all pending criminal defeat device cases and bring no new ones. The DOJ Environment and Natural Resources Division announced the policy shift in a post on X. Friday's pardons finished the job for the men already convicted.

What emissions hardware gets deleted, and why

Modern diesel emissions control stacks four interlocking systems. Exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) routes exhaust back into the intake to lower combustion temperatures and cut nitrogen oxide formation. The diesel particulate filter (DPF) is a ceramic honeycomb in the exhaust stream that traps soot, then periodically burns it off in a regeneration cycle that dumps extra fuel into the exhaust to hit temperatures around 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit. Selective catalytic reduction (SCR) injects diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), a urea and water mix, into the exhaust to convert nitrogen oxides into nitrogen and water. The onboard diagnostic system (OBD) monitors every component and reports faults.

The OBD enforces compliance. Run out of DEF or throw a sensor code the system reads as tampering or malfunction, and the engine control module begins derating the truck. First it cuts power. Then, under the inducement strategies EPA required manufacturers to build in, it can limit the vehicle to as little as 5 mph. A loaded truck limping at 5 mph on an interstate shoulder is a stranded asset and a missed delivery.

Brad Bylsma, state equipment fleet manager for the Alaska Department of Transportation, said in March that DEF systems account for a significant portion of maintenance issues and costs across state-owned diesel vehicles. DEF freezes at 12 degrees Fahrenheit. Sensors foul. DPFs clog on trucks that do a lot of low-speed, low-temperature work, which describes school buses, ambulances, plow trucks, and farm equipment. Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska defended one of the pardoned men by noting that his shop modified emissions systems so that trucks would not shut down in subzero conditions.

What a delete costs versus what compliance costs

A full delete removes the hardware (the DPF, the EGR cooler and valve, and the SCR system) and replaces it with a straight pipe and block-off plates. The hardware is only half the job. The OBD will detect the missing components and derate the truck, so every delete requires a tune, an ECU reflash or a plug-in tuner that reprograms the engine computer to stop looking for the emissions equipment, stop running regens, stop demanding DEF, and stop derating. The tune is the actual defeat device in the eyes of the law, and it is what Geouge, the LaLones, and most of the others were prosecuted over.

The economics of a deleted truck mean no derates, no DEF (which runs a real cost per gallon across hundreds of thousands of miles), no regen cycles and the fuel penalty they carry, and no DPF replacement, which can run $3,000 to $7,000 for the filter alone on a Class 8 truck, considerably more with labor and related sensors. The EPA Air Enforcement Division estimated years ago that more than half a million diesel pickup trucks alone had been deleted over roughly a decade. Enforcement never came close to touching the actual population of deleted vehicles. It touched the shops.

Bulletproofing is a different animal. Bulletproofing means hardening the known failure points and upgrading EGR coolers, head studs, oil coolers, and sensors so the emissions system survives rather than being removed. It is legal, it is legitimate, and shops that do it have watched customers walk out the door to delete shops because deleting was cheaper and more effective at solving the reliability problem. The legal fix competes against an illegal fix that works better.

When the enforcement campaign started, and under which administration

The EPA raid on Troy Lake's shop happened in 2018, during the first Trump administration. The National Compliance Initiative that made defeat devices a top enforcement priority launched in 2019, also under Trump. The Volkswagen scandal in the mid-2010s poured accelerant on all of it and gave prosecutors a template. The Biden years then took that machinery and ran it hard. EPA finalized 172 civil defeat-device cases between 2020 and 2023, imposing $55.5 million in penalties, and the criminal cases stacked up alongside them. Lake pleaded guilty in June 2024, was sentenced that December to a year and a day, and reported to FCI Florence in February 2025. He spent his 65th birthday inside.

Then the pendulum swung. Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming made Lake a cause, wrote directly to Trump in September 2025, and introduced the Diesel Truck Liberation Act the following month, a bill that would strip EPA authority over vehicle emissions enforcement, bar prosecutions for tampering, and vacate existing sentences. Trump pardoned Lake in November 2025.

So in the span of eight years, the same government raided a shop, prosecuted its owner, imprisoned him, pardoned him, stopped prosecuting the conduct entirely, and began legislating to erase the crime. If you are a fleet planning a five-year equipment strategy, that is a coin flip that reruns every election.

What the pardon does not give back

Nothing in the pardons or the Blanche memo repeals a single word of the Clean Air Act. Civil penalties of $45,268 per tampered engine and $4,527 per defeat device sold remain fully on the books, and a future administration can restart criminal referrals with a one-page memo. The Diesel Truck Liberation Act would vacate sentences and expunge records, but as described, it appropriates nothing. Congress is the only body that can actually make these men whole, and the bill written in their honor does not do it.

A full pardon applies to all remaining punishment, so whatever portion of a fine remained unpaid on July 3 is wiped out. Whatever was already paid stays paid, forever, unless Congress passes a bill to give it back. This was settled in 1877 in Knote v. United States. Once a fine or forfeiture has entered the Treasury, a pardon confers no right to a refund. The Constitution bars money from leaving the Treasury without a congressional appropriation, and a pardon is not an appropriation. Troy Lake's fines, the Diesel Freak corporate fine, Geouge's forfeitures on a $10 million operation, if it was paid, the government keeps it while simultaneously declaring the prosecution was persecution.

What changed between 2007 and 2010, and what it cost

The diesel engine that entered the DPF era was already a radically cleaner machine than the one that came before it. Between the early 1990s and 2007, diesel emissions dropped by an order of magnitude through combustion engineering, injection timing, turbocharging, and, critically, the 2006 mandate for ultra-low-sulfur diesel, which cut fuel sulfur content from 500 parts per million to 15 parts per million. Particulate matter and NOx standards tightened roughly 90 percent across that stretch. Those gains came from improving the engine itself. They did not leave anyone stranded on the side of the road.

The 2007 DPF mandate and the 2010 NOx standard that effectively required SCR and DEF went after the final increment. That increment is real but marginal, purchased at enormous cost. The price was a compliance apparatus that added five figures to the cost of every truck, created failure modes that did not previously exist, punished the smallest operators hardest, and manufactured a criminal underground out of the mechanics those operators depended on.

What this means for a shop or small fleet today

The pardons and the DOJ policy shift mean no new criminal prosecutions for defeat devices under current policy. Civil enforcement remains intact. A shop that sells a tuner or performs a delete today faces no immediate criminal exposure, but EPA can still impose $45,268 per engine in civil penalties if enforcement resumes. A fleet that runs deleted trucks faces the same civil exposure, plus the operational risk that the policy reverses after the next election. The coin will flip again.