The federal Transportation Department said more than 550 commercial driving schools in the U.S. must close after investigators found they fell short of federal safety requirements for training truck and bus drivers, a move the department said is aimed at improving safety in the trucking industry.
The department said the latest action follows 1,426 site visits completed in December, with inspectors identifying “significant shortcomings” at schools the department wants to decertify. It said the decision comes as the Trump administration continues efforts to tighten commercial driver’s license oversight after a fatal crash in August raised questions about how some drivers received CDLs.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the enforcement is intended to ensure the public has confidence that school bus and truck drivers are trained properly before getting behind the wheel. He also pointed to a Florida crash that he said involved a truck driver who was not authorized to be in the U.S., and the crash killed three people. The department said other fatal crashes since then, including one in Indiana earlier this month that killed four people, reinforced safety concerns.
In its announcement, the department said 448 of the schools targeted for closure failed to meet basic safety standards. Inspectors cited problems such as employing unqualified instructors, failing to test students’ skills adequately, failing to teach students how to handle hazardous materials, and using the wrong equipment to train drivers.
The department said another 109 schools removed themselves from the registry when they learned inspections were planned. The department said it was not immediately clear how many students were enrolled at the schools being decertified or how many graduated, and it said officials may follow up on those graduates later.
The Transportation Department said the list of schools targeted for closure includes smaller programs and, in some cases, school district-run operations. It said that five larger, more established programs associated with the national Commercial Vehicle Training Association were audited and passed, while another 97 schools were under investigation for compliance issues.
Some in the trucking training industry said they support the enforcement approach aimed at weeding out schools that fail to meet requirements. Jeffery Burkhardt, chair of the national trucking schools group, said established schools welcome efforts to eliminate “bad schools” and argued the audits represent the first time regulators have enforced the standards for driving schools that were passed in 2022. Burkhardt said those audits create “no problem” for reputable providers, arguing that the “good players have no problem with it” and that compliance reviews remove bad operators. Another trucking schools advocate, Burkhardt also said that he hoped any unqualified drivers would have been screened out before reaching the highway through state skills tests.
The department also said it wants to address what observers describe as limited oversight in the past, noting that schools and trucking companies can effectively self-certify when they apply to operate and that questionable programs might not be caught until later when the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration conducts audits. The department’s statement did not provide new details on the number of people affected by the decertifications, but it said the agency may look at outcomes for graduates.
Trucking industry groups said they praised the decertification actions. The American Trucking Association and the Owner Operator Independent Drivers Association commended the effort to shut down what they described as “sham schools” that do not meet safety standards. Todd Spencer, president of the independent owners group, said reliance on questionable training schools “fueled a destructive churn” in the industry, arguing that some companies chose to cut corners by pushing undertrained drivers onto the road rather than addressing retention problems and working conditions.
The department said its enforcement also links to federal funding and compliance measures. It said the administration has threatened to withhold federal funding from states that do not clean up their commercial driver’s license programs, and it reported that California is the only state to lose funding so far with the federal government planning to withhold $160 million. The department said it is threatening to withhold $128 million from Illinois after an audit found problems with nearly 20% of the 150 licenses it reviewed, and it said problems in 10 states have included licenses that remained valid after a person’s authorization to be in the U.S. expired and instances where states did not show they checked a driver’s immigration status before issuing a license.