Just as freight markets were getting weird enough, the Trump administration decided April was the perfect time to crack down on English requirements for truck drivers with new trucking regulations.
The executive order sounds official enough — "Enforcing Commonsense Rules of the Road for America's Truck Drivers" — but the execution is messy. Drivers must now prove they can "read and speak" English through a vague two-step process: a spoken interview and traffic sign recognition test.
Here's the problem: there's no standardized test. No set questions, no specific signs, no objective criteria. Individual inspectors at weigh stations and state troopers decide who passes and who doesn't. Fleets are left to make their own assessments with zero federal guidance.
This creates obvious issues. Enforcement will be inconsistent at best, biased at worst. And it's happening while ports are already seeing fewer containers coming through — now we potentially lose drivers too.
If you’re in logistics, you know how this plays out. Regulations that sound reasonable in Washington often create real operational problems for moving freight. This one’s no different, just with worse timing.
Let’s break it all down.
Remember when we had too many trucks and not enough freight? Well, kiss that buyer’s market goodbye. Analysts are saying roughly 10% of current drivers — hundreds of thousands of people — might not make the cut with these English requirements. Sure, we’ve been dealing with surplus capacity since the post-COVID freight party ended, but suddenly pulling that many drivers off the road is going to flip things fast.
The impacts will hit cross-border freight too; Mexican carriers handling your border runs are sure to face the same tests.
So while some industry folks are calling this a healthy “rightsizing,” the rest of us get to deal with carriers suddenly getting picky about loads, higher rejection rates, and the fun game of finding trucks that actually want your freight. Short-term pain for long-term gain, they say. Easy for them to say.
As if the capacity squeeze wasn’t enough, get ready to open your wallet wider. Fewer drivers mean higher rates — it’s not rocket science, just basic supply and demand principles. When a driver gets sidelined for failing the English test, carriers will have to send a backup truck, which means paying double for labor and fuel on that load.
Then there’s the lovely cascade of costs: carriers scrambling to get their drivers English training, dealing with CSA violations that can run into thousands of dollars, and higher insurance premiums when compliance goes sideways.
But wait, there’s more! Miss a delivery window because your driver got pulled off the road? Hello, contract penalties, cargo spoilage, and the always-fun conversation with your customer about why their time-sensitive shipment is sitting in a truck stop instead of their dock.
If you thought it couldn’t get worse, say goodbye to predictable delivery windows.
Every weigh station and checkpoint is now conducting these English tests — a spoken interview plus sign recognition that can add precious minutes to what used to be routine stops. In an industry in which being five minutes late can throw off an entire day, those “few extra minutes” are about to become your nemesis.
If a driver fails the test, he or she is immediately placed out of service. Right there. Right then. Your load will become a very expensive paperweight until someone can send a replacement driver to babysit it to its destination. The smart money is already padding schedules and building in backup plans, because “on-time delivery” just became a much more creative concept.
Speaking of compliance theater, let’s talk about what this means if you’re a carrier. Any oversight on English proficiency is now a full-blown safety violation, which means you can’t just hope for the best anymore — you’re on the hook for every driver in your fleet.
It’s even worse if you’re a smaller carrier — you’re basically sitting ducks. Losing even one driver to an English test failure can shut you down if you don’t have a bench of backup drivers waiting around.
And remember that driver shortage we were already dealing with — about 62,000 drivers short as of last count? Well, congratulations, it could get worse. Now, carriers are racing to audit every driver file, implement English proficiency checks during hiring, and somehow navigate the legal minefield of not appearing to discriminate while still enforcing the rules.
It’s a compliance nightmare wrapped in a staffing crisis, topped with a legal liability bow. The carriers that survive this are going to be charging accordingly, and the ones that don’t? Well, good luck finding trucks.
We’ve just walked through a regulatory nightmare that’s about to make your job significantly harder. But here’s the thing — while you can’t control what comes out of Washington, you can control how you respond to it. A solid transportation management system like EKA’s Omni-TMS™ can be the difference between drowning in compliance chaos and staying ahead of it.
So here we are — new English proficiency rules, tighter capacity, higher costs, and delivery schedules that just became suggestions. The regulatory train has left the station, and you can either get on board with proactive compliance or spend the next few months explaining to customers why their freight is playing hide-and-seek somewhere between origin and destination. Smart operators are already auditing their driver files, padding their schedules, and reviewing contracts for penalty clauses. And the ones that aren’t? Good luck.
EKA Solutions built Omni-TMS specifically for moments like these — when regulations change the game and you need systems that can keep up. Our platform gives you real-time visibility across your entire transportation network, automates the compliance workflows that used to eat up your day, and spots problems before they strand your loads. While others are still playing catch-up to figure out which driver just got sidelined, you’ll already have backup plans running.
Ready to stop fighting fires and start preventing them? Contact EKA Solutions today to schedule a demo.
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