Statement For The Record On Highways & Transit

The below statement for the record was submitted to the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Highways and Transit on July 24, 2024, on behalf of all NASTC members and in a broader sense, on behalf of all small, full truckload carriers.

The National Association of Small Trucking Companies (NASTC) appreciates the subcommittee’s holding this hearing to examine the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) regulatory and administrative agenda. Regrettably, the Biden-Harris administration’s DOT has wielded an even heavier hand than the Obama administration did. And the costs and burden of this regulatory morass fall disproportionately harshly on small trucking firms.

NASTC is a member-based organization whose 14,000 member companies range from a significant segment that operates as a single-power-unit, owner-operator model to carriers having more than 100 power units; NASTC members average 12 power units. These companies mostly operate in the long-haul, over-the-road, full-truckload, for-hire, irregular-route sector of interstate trucking. NASTC members come from the largest segment of America’s long-haul trucking: small motor carrier businesses. They are representative of the vast majority of our nation’s commercial motor carriers, those having fewer than 100 power units.

Recent estimates quantify how much the regulatory burden costs the U.S. economy. The National Association of Manufacturers says the total cost is $3.1 trillion annually.*  In its analysis, the Competitive Enterprise Institute says the current administration has been much more regulatorily active than its immediate predecessor administrations. 2 CEI’s report puts total compliance costs and economic effects due to federal regulations at $2.1 trillion annually. DOT ranks third “most active rule-producing executive branch” agency in the U.S. government for FY 2023. President Biden in three years has averaged 87 highly significant rules per year; in four years, President Trump averaged 72 annually, including more than 50 deregulatory actions that reduce the costs regulations impose; President Obama, over eight years, averaged 69 completed economically significant rules annually; over his eight years, President George W. Bush averaged 49 completed economically significant rules per year.

Furthermore, regulatory ping pong is alive and well, including at DOT. The Obama administration proposed a host of trucking regulations. The Trump administration
withdrew many of them. The Biden-Harris DOT revived those regulatory proposals, such as the speed limiter rulemaking and the safety fitness determination (SFD) rulemaking. NASTC opposes these regulations.

As we have expressed to the committee many times before, mandatory speed limiters would create rolling traffic jams and increase congestion, frustration, and risky driving tactics—leading to more highway accidents, injuries, deaths, and property loss. Meanwhile, it would deprive small carriers of the ability to drive the speed limit on highways, as opposed to the governed trucks of the megacarriers as a means to control their fuel costs. This would raise costs of operation.

The SFD rule would further confuse the issue that the Compliance Safety Accountability’s (CSA) subjective, spottily data-based, unfair-to-small carrier ratings
have completely failed to achieve since its initiation in 2010. If this administration’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) were serious about ensuring carrier safety, it would implement the idea NASTC has advocated for several years now: Scale up the new entrant virtual safety inspection such that bi- or triennial safety “audits” are conducted on every carrier with DOT authority (i.e., FMCSA would oversee sufficient numbers of contractors to conduct audits of half or one-third of the population of interstate motor carriers each year); each “audit” should result in issuance of a Satisfactory safety rating, unless objective evidence leads to subsequent investigation; FMCSA should provide extensive due-process measures to ensure a carrier can efficiently, promptly take measures to warrant and expeditiously receive at least a Conditional rating within five days.

Another regulatory burden is the automatic emergency braking (AEB) mandate. This was enacted in the infrastructure law. AEBs in heavy vehicles will cause more wrecks than they prevent. The technology is far too premature to use at scale, much less to mandate on commercial vehicles. These regulations were rejected over the years since CSA was initiated, and resurfaced under each Democratic administration. They should be rejected now and in the future (and the AEB mandate repealed).

In addition, the Biden-Harris administration threatens trucking and its ability to perform the vital role it plays in our supply chains through several other lines of regulatory assault. One is the Environmental Protection Agency’s phase 3 greenhouse gas standard. The EPA reaches the height of absurdity with such an unachievable, unrealistic GHG requirement. This obviously is part of the administration’s zealotry for forcing America, including the trucking industry, into all-electric vehicles. The administration’s ultimate goal, the elimination of internal-combustion vehicles, faces an American public that rejects that destination. 3 Moreover, the cost is prohibitive. The Roland Berger firm has estimated that infrastructure costs alone for fully switching trucking to electric power would cost $1 trillion. 4 Then the extra weight of electric batteries translates into less freight that a single tractor-trailer could haul, requiring many more vehicles on the road to carry the same amount of freight larger capacity rigs carry today. Such absurd regulatory burdens will carry unreasonable costs that will necessarily be passed along to shippers, warehousers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, and consumers.

Finally, there is the heavy-handed regulatory excess of the administration’s assault on the independent contractor model. The Biden-Harris Department of Labor is pursuing policies that would essentially federalize the California AB5 law and its “ABC test” for worker reclassification. Blue-collar entrepreneurs in the trucking sector opt for independent-contractor status. Yet, the Biden administration seeks to impose AB5’s reclassifying independent owner-operators as “employees” on the entire United States. Land Line reports, “California has made an adversary out of many in the trucking industry . . . [and is] driving truckers out of the state.” 5 AB5’s B prong (The service is performed outside the usual course of the business of the “employer.”) is impossible for most independent contractors, including those in trucking, to meet.

It would be bad enough if these regulatory measures were enacted by Congress. The end-running of the legislative branch, abuse of administrative authorities, and overreaching regulatory processes corrupt the functioning of our government and make the governed cynical toward the federal government. The data in the findings of the cited and other studies show that this administration has been overly energetic with administrative actions that foul up the separation of powers, the constitutional checks and balances, and the accountability of the regulatory and administrative state.

We can assure the subcommittee that the Biden regulatory burden and cost are felt in the small trucking sector. Just in our relatively small population of companies, almost 4,000 member companies have closed or suspended their authority. In addition, we feel that almost all of these regulatory overreaches have violated the spirit and true meaning of the Administrative Procedure Act.

This reregulation onslaught aimed at small businesses and the trucking industry has accelerated, it seems, as regulators have lost sight of our way of life, our economy, and our future. To the administration’s shame, based on just-released fatality numbers for 2021, since CSA’s implementation in 2010, raw fatality numbers have skyrocketed from 3,675 in 2010 to 5,788 in 2021, and from 1.3 per 100 million miles travelled to 1.9 per 100 million miles travelled those same years. And, for the first time in history, over 1,000 occupants of large trucks, almost all being professional CDL holders, lost their lives in highway accidents.

# # #

A recurring theme in our statement is the overbearing, undeserved, and misdirected regulatory attack on small businesses and independent contractors.

NASTC has lost 4,000+ companies in the last eighteen months. If small businesses and entrepreneurs are harassed out of the marketplace, our capitalistic economic model will no longer be functionable, central planning with government ownership and control will take over, and socialism will be the new reality in the United States.

Please take our comments seriously. Please call us with opposing opinions and/or suggestions to expand our arguments. Please do what you can on a local and state level to raise awareness concerning this non-stop re-regulation insanity.

*https://nam.org/issues/regulatory-and-legal-reform/cost-of-regulations/#crains

** https://cei.org/studies/ten-thousand-commandments-2024/

*** https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-electric-vehicle-mandate-gas-powered-cars-2032-epa c2a72414st=zpwhzjf3qa9p5v7&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

**** https://www.cleanfreightcoalition.org/sites/default/files/2024-03/RB Study Report_final[111225].pdf

***** Mark Schremmer, “AB5 creates ‘hurdle’ for truckers, California Trucking Association leader says,” Land Line (April 13, 2023)(https://landline.media/ab5-creates-hurdle-for-truckers-california-trucking-association-leader-says/).