By Jacob Burg
When a semi-truck driver made an illegal U-turn on the Florida Turnpike in August 2025, causing the deaths of three occupants in a minivan, debate ignited over the industry that trains truck drivers and the skill level of those who possess commercial driver’s licenses.
The Florida crash, along with several other fatal accidents caused by semi-truck drivers in recent months, triggered new regulations from the Department of Transportation (DOT) on the trucking industry for the first time in three years and cast a spotlight on “CDL mills.”
So-called CDL mills are companies that offer training for the commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) required for truckers, but otherwise sidestep state regulations and “self-certify” with the federal government as trucker training companies.
As the DOT proceeds with its removal of nearly 3,000 such providers from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) registry and puts an additional 4,500 training providers “on notice due to potential noncompliance,” multiple trucker training providers said the changes are long overdue.
The DOT announced the changes in early December 2025, just days before a trucker rear-ended a car in Washington state, setting the vehicle ablaze and killing its 29-year-old driver.
Trucker training companies told The Epoch Times that limited federal oversight before and after the agency first overhauled the rules on commercial driver’s licenses in 2022 has led to major discrepancies in training quality from one company to the next.
Those changes, implemented three years ago, were intended to increase safety in the industry, but led to the proliferation of CDL mills, according to Anne Bauza, president of the Driver Resource Center, a commercial driver’s license training company.
These programs “rush students through the process within a couple of days or maybe weeks, with just a little or no real instruction,” Bauza told The Epoch Times.
“They’re focusing strictly on passing the test, giving them the basic knowledge that they need to take the driving test, but without the other requirements that are necessary for them to build a building block.”
In some states, there’s also a disconnect between the offices that issue licenses and those that track applicants’ immigration status, providers said.
Federal officials had pointed out that multiple truckers who caused fatal crashes this year—many of whom are listed in a Dec. 16, 2025, report from the Department of Homeland Security—had all received their commercial driver’s licenses in California and had entered the country illegally.
In the case of the Florida crash, California officials have said the federal government told them driver Harjinder Singh was in the United States legally with a work permit when they issued him a commercial driver’s license in 2024. Florida officials said Singh had entered the United States illegally via Mexico in 2018.
The DOT also accused thousands of trucker training schools of failing to comply with federal guidelines and forging or manipulating their training data.
Some trucker training companies are “just shameless in their advertising,” according to Jeff Burkhardt, the senior director of operations at the commercial driver’s license training provider Ancora Education.
“One day CDL, two-day, three-day CDL—that’s listed on their websites,” he told The Epoch Times.
Government Issues Regulations
The DOT’s new crackdown on commercial driver’s license training providers is one of the agency’s most significant industry overhauls since the FMCSA changed the rules in 2022 on how trainees apply for their licenses.
From 2022, trucker trainees have been subject to Entry-Level Driver Training regulations, which means they must complete training from a federally registered training provider before taking their commercial driver’s license test.
“Prior to that [2022], you could get your permit on your own, get trained by your uncle, your friend, and just go to the DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles] and pass the road test,” Jonathan Marques, the founder of Driving Academy, a commercial driver’s license training provider, told The Epoch Times.
Burkhardt said this offered “a lot more flexibility for the consumer.” He also serves as chairman of the board for the Commercial Vehicle Training Association.
He said the changes in 2022 aimed to create a more professional environment in the trucking industry with new rules requiring entry-level drivers to receive structured training.
At the same time, the DOT also launched its training provider registry, which required all commercial driver’s license training providers to self-certify that they meet federal training requirements and to retain a record of all trainees who have completed their courses.
While the new driver training regulations aimed to create central standardized training to improve driver quality nationwide, what resulted was “the Wild Wild West … in the transportation industry,” Bauza said.
“FMCSA allowed companies to self-certify that they were going to comply with the rules and regulations—no boots on the ground,” she said.
Adding to the layers of complexity are state regulations regarding the delivery of truck driver training, which may either exceed or fall short of the federal guidelines.
However, “variances between oversight bodies at the state level and the curriculum and training content that they mandated” were present even before the new federal regulations were rolled out in 2022, Burkhardt said.
He said there was “no difference in scrutiny” from the federal government on legitimate versus illegitimate trucker training providers throughout the states.
Marques believes the federal government in 2022 was also trying to widen the industry and prevent a “bottleneck of the actual trucking schools,” in part by allowing trucking companies and other entities such as county utilities, shipping carriers, and school districts to train their own employees by signing up as training providers.
“That is how a lot of unlicensed state schools kind of went underneath the radar and set up as a trucking company to be a training provider, but ultimately providing training to the outside public,” he said.
What makes the process even more complicated, according to Marques, is that each state has its own state-wide agency that manages truckers, with some using their DMVs, boards of education, or state transportation departments.
Some of the providers, Marques said, tell the federal government that they’re a trucking company training their own employees when in reality, “they were training the outside public without the proper licensing from the state itself.”
This created a conduit for fraud, as many providers simply bypassed state oversight bodies and essentially checked off boxes through self-certification with the federal government, but without actually offering a proficient curriculum, Burkhardt said.
Most training providers in California are required to be state-certified, with the state’s Department of Consumer Affairs’ Bureau of Private Post-Secondary Education handling licensing.
However, trucker schools can skip state certification and self-certify in the federal registry if they’re a public education entity, or if they offer a registered apprenticeship training program through California’s Division of Apprenticeship Standards.
Noncitizens With Licenses
In late September, the DOT began addressing commercial driver’s license requirements for non-domiciled drivers—foreign nationals who don’t reside in the United States, or who have temporary legal presence in the United States.
“Moving forward, non-citizens will not be eligible for a non-domiciled CDL unless they meet a much stricter set of rules, including an employment-based visa and undergoing a mandatory federal immigration status check using the SAVE system,” the DOT stated on Sept. 26, referring to a federal online service to verify an individual’s immigration status.
The agency ordered all states to pause issuing non-domiciled commercial driver’s licenses until states demonstrate compliance with federal rules.
“So what certain states were doing, they weren’t even looking at the work visa, and the drivers’ CDL licenses were still extended past their work visa, which means, technically, legally, they had no right to be working here,” Marques said.
Currently, only three types of visa holders, outside of lawful permanent residents, are eligible to apply for a commercial driver’s license in the United States: H2-B, H2-A, and E-2.
After a federal audit, the DOT accused California, Washington state, Texas, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Colorado of improperly issuing commercial driver’s licenses to noncitizens.
The DOT has also focused on enforcing English proficiency requirements. In May, DOT Secretary Sean Duffy signed an order announcing new guidelines to strengthen English language enforcement for commercial truck operators and place failed drivers out-of-service.
Marques said that while commercial driver’s license holders have long been required to communicate in basic English, proficiency, and especially fluency, can vary.
Some of the CDL mills in California have focused on specific nationalities and will tailor their training to minimize the use of English, Marques said.
“Then you’re just kind of milling people through, so there are very little checks and balances when it comes to the immigrant stuff, because from a business point of view, they had their target audience,” he said.
Even so, Burkhardt said that while some providers are tailoring their curriculum to give foreign nationals the “best understanding as far as the progression of their training,” the applicants must still pass their commercial driver’s license exam in English, which is administered either by state oversight bodies or “authorized third-party testers that act on behalf of the state.”
Fixing the System
Burkhardt said the new regulatory actions have sent shockwaves through the industry, and that legitimate training providers like his own welcome the new rules.
Beyond supporting the DOT’s crackdown on CDL mills and its new regulations for the trucking industry, Bauza says the key to training safe truckers is providing them with a strong foundation.
“As a school, I consider us the roots of an oak tree. We’re never seen, but if we give them really strong roots and give them the curriculum and the training necessary, they’re going to be able to go out and become a proficient, professional driver,” she said.
One of the biggest faults with CDL mills in failing to adequately train driver applicants is that students may pass the commercial driver’s license exam after paying for the training, but then, when they apply for jobs at various trucking companies, the applicants quickly realize they don’t know the necessary skills needed to get hired, Bauza added.
She would also like to see the DOT put “boots on the ground” to verify that all training providers are teaching real proficiency, reside in a physical location with an actual curriculum, and possess trucks that are in “working order.”
Jill McLaughlin contributed to this report.
