2025 Year-End Review: Mostly Uninteresting.
I'm kidding. Freight has NEVER been this interesting. We made it to the mass media. We opened the conversation. We did it! Man, what a time to be alive.
This article does not aim to review the tragic wrecks of 2025 but to emphasize the administration’s focus on the trucking industry.
For the last 4 or 5 years, everyone in freight has been trying to figure out what was/is going on. Year after year, the freight cycle didn’t end, as expected. The smartest data analysts, the most seasoned economists, and the loudest transportation experts eventually stopped trying to predict anything. At some point, we quietly admitted the truth… Nobody knew what the heck was going on.
It was the freight cycle that refused to cycle. A market that never corrected itself. It was the cycle that just… dragged on. And on and on… and on.
Then, we entered 2025. The smoke finally started to clear. We stopped asking, “What’s happening?” and started asking, “WHO made this happen?!!!”
And for better or worse, 2025 brought the trucking industry’s conversations into the open. This is the first time, maybe ever, that the trucking industry has held Americans' attention for more than a few days or weeks. We made headlines in major media outlets. You guys, we did it! We turned up the volume, and nobody turned it back down.
Before 2025, I rarely talked about anything outside freight tech. Freight tech is what I do for a living. That is my day job at Revenova, so that’s what I stuck to — our product, new features, demos, workflows, tech things. This was my comfort zone. But 2025 changed something in me, as it did for many of you. I realized the trucking community had been shouting about these issues for years, but no one was listening. For far too long, the American trucking community had been ignored. And I wanted to know why.
I’m a skeptic to a fault. I heard the stories, I listened to the warnings, but most of what people shared didn’t come with data attached. So I went looking for it. I knew they were right, but I wanted the numbers. People listen to numbers. And so, I got to work. Starting with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) Company census file.
The moment I started posting about all of this, the data mess, and calling it a dumpster fire, the messages started coming in.
“You’re going to get yourself in trouble.”
“Are you sure you want to say that publicly?”
“Can you not put this information out there?”
Those made me think deeply about what I was doing. Yes, it was risky. Financially, professionally, and personally. But I chose to do it anyway. And so did many of you. For that, I want to thank you.
Thank you for caring about this industry.
Thank you for caring about the future of the American truck driver.
And thank you for refusing to look away.
Year in Review
March 2025 - June 20, 2025
Doom-scrolling. Rage posting on X. Making new friends.
May 20, 2025
This is the first day Secretary Sean Duffy posted on X about trucking. On this day, he signed an executive order that upgraded English Language Proficiency (ELP) violations to out-of-service (OOS) violations. Remember, the requirement that truck drivers speak and read English has been around since 1937.
For a more in-depth review of the ELP, here’s an article for you:
June 20, 2025
Following my doom-scrolling of the FMCSA data and posting about it on X, FreightCaviar was the first to give me a platform to share my findings. In the article, ‘Eye-Opening Patterns in FMCSA Data,’ I exposed everything I had found in the millions of rows of trucking companies. It is, to say the least, concerning. **We still have so much work to do here.
June 25, 2025
ELP enforcement — activated.
I’ll admit, I was overly optimistic. I thought this would impact the industry harder and faster than it has. What we’ve observed instead is that enforcement is uneven at best. Some states are actively issuing out-of-service violations. And some are not.
Then, we have California, which is the most obnoxious. To date, they have issued only ONE out-of-service violation.
Some drivers continue to treat the ELP OOS violations like a time-out. They wait out the clock or until the enforcement officer drives off, then they keep on trucking. Other than having a rough estimate of the total number of non-English-speaking truck drivers and awareness of the issue, this has done nothing.
June 27, 2025
Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the USDOT launched a nationwide audit of state practices for issuing non-domiciled CDLs, specifically to review the potential for unqualified individuals to obtain licenses and pose a hazard on our roads.
It’s the government. They have to do everything to prove the potential.
August 8, 2025
I stumbled onto hundreds of CDL copies. Truly, a treasure chest of a find. *Shoutout to a vibe-coded app that left the backend wide-open. As I went through them, I realized they were not issued in accordance with the law. The only ones I could confirm with absolute certainty were from New York, because both the visa and CDL expiration dates are printed directly on the license.
When the immigration document (visa) expires, the CDL is no longer valid. I could only speculate that many states were following New York’s behavior. At this point, who knows how many invalid/legally expired CDLs are on our roads?!
As American Truckers United (ATU) has long pointed out, the issues we face in the trucking industry are in large part due to Employment Authorization Documents (EAD cards). Legally, these are issued as valid for 6-18 months.
This particular issue took off on the internet. It was instantly understood, instantly shareable, and it connected neatly to the massive H-1B fraud already being exposed in tech, healthcare, and other sectors.
The U-turn crash in Florida certainly pushed everyone over the edge. The matters in trucking were no longer siloed and ignored as some abstract policy debate. It was suddenly clear that something terrible was going on, and that something impacts every person who drives on America’s highways.
August 21, 2025
I was on my way to pick up my four-year-old from daycare when my phone started blowing up. It was this. Secretary Marco Rubio had announced a pause on all work visas for commercial truck drivers.
I cried. This is the moment when I knew they were listening. The administration acknowledged the potential fraud and the national security issue we had been talking and posting about.
September 26, 2025
Secretary Sean Duffy held a press conference to announce emergency action based on the initial findings of the USDOT’s CDL audit. This action drastically restricted who is eligible for a CDL. Non-citizens no longer qualify for a non-domiciled CDL unless they meet a much stricter set of rules. The EAD cards are no longer eligible.
The audit uncovered both a catastrophic pattern of states issuing licenses illegally to foreign drivers and the fact that, even if the current regulatory framework is followed, it can still fail. The confluence of these two factors has created an imminent hazard on America’s roadways that must be fixed.
There is one part of this press release that lives vividly in my head.
”We’ve heard from truckers and safety advocates, and news reports, that something was seriously wrong. It was alleged that the open-border policies of the last administration have led to the exploitation of our nation’s trucking licensing system. So today, I’m here to tell you after our audit that those reports… They’re all true.” —Secretary Sean Duffy
They. Are. All. True.
We were right.
November 12, 2025
California. Governor Gavin Newsom blatantly disregards Secretary Sean Duffy’s rules for truck drivers. Why? I have no idea. Why do we keep giving them X-number of days to fix it? Again, I have no idea.
“After weeks of claiming they did nothing wrong, Gavin Newsom and California have been caught red-handed. Now that we’ve exposed their lies, 17,000 illegally issued trucking licenses are being revoked,” said U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy. “This is just the tip of the iceberg. My team will continue to force California to prove they have removed every illegal immigrant from behind the wheel of semitrucks and school buses.”
Notices have been issued to the 17,000 non-domiciled CDL holders that their license no longer meets federal requirements and will expire in 60 days. FMCSA requires California to provide its full audit of all its non-domiciled CDLs so the agency can verify that every illegally issued license has been revoked and that the failures that allowed these licenses to be issued are corrected.
USDOT Audit Findings: California.
The non-domiciled CDL audits are ongoing. Thus far, we have numbers for three states.
California: 25% of non-domiciled CDLs were illegally issued.
New York: 53% of non-domiciled CDLs were illegally issued.
Minnesota: 33% of non-domiciled CDLs were illegally issued.
We haven't even covered Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Utah, Washington, or Texas, yet... We have barely scratched the surface.
December 1, 2025
The FMCSA finally announced a complete overhaul of the vetting process for Electronic Logging Devices (ELDs). We’ve needed this since the beginning, but it is better late than never, I suppose.
In 2025, the FMCSA removed ~28 ELDs from the agency’s list of approved electronic logging devices (ELDs). For a deeper dive into how we got here and why it matters, see my July 2025 article.
Also, December 1, 2025
I won’t call them CDL schools; they are CDL mills. We lowered the barrier to entry so far that I’d say we have no barrier. It is a line drawn in the sand that one must tap their head three times, then hop across to become a truck driver. It seems that those days may be coming to an end. Or so I hope.
Secretary Sean Duffy announced the removal of nearly 3,000 CDL training providers from the FMCSA’s Training Provider Registry (TPR) for failing to equip trainees with the Trump Administration’s standards of readiness. Another 4,500 training providers were placed on notice due to potential noncompliance.
When all else fails, call ICE.
As I mentioned earlier, the English Language Proficiency rule did very little to change the driver capacity pool meaningfully. But once the administration grasped the scope of the problem, immigration enforcement ramped up. Across seven state enforcement operations, ICE has detained 686 commercial truck drivers.
Oklahoma: 125
Indiana: 146
New York: 30
Texas: 31
Wyoming: 40
Mississippi: 145
California: 87
*This total only includes the published operations.
December 21, 2025
Craig Fuller has kept us updated on the truckload tender rejections. Rejections have surged to 12.83%, the highest level we’ve seen since 2021! This is remarkable.
Capacity is tightening. The market is shifting. Buckle up, kids. We’re coming back.
And to FreightX,
I have a deep love for you and the community we’ve built. We’ve faced the most backlash and the most hardcore claims that we would never get anything done. But guess what? We did. We freaking did!
May you always remember, you can just do things. *You may get your account locked once a month by the mass reporters overseas or have deranged people coming after you online, but you must keep going.
We’ve received multiple confirmations that the administration reads X religiously and discusses our posts in their meetings. To echo Mike Cernovich, this has never happened in our lifetimes. Yes, it is an amazing feeling. To know we aren’t just shouting (posting) into the void… Yes, absolutely amazing.
Wow, what a year. I hope that years from now, we can look back on all of this and see how much real, lasting change was made for American trucking in 2025. I want to wish you a truly Merry Christmas! Thank you for the support, the conversations, and for caring enough about this industry to stay engaged.
Here’s to keeping the momentum going in 2026 ❤️
