Is it time to tear down the existing CDL training provider registry and start over?
Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) Administrator Derek Barrs addressed the current state of the registry while addressing members of the Truckload Carriers Association during the group’s annual convention the first week of March.
He began the March 2 address by stressing the importance of values and integrity in the trucking industry.
“What are the values of your drivers? What are the values of your companies?” Barrs asked. “For me, it has to be faith. It has to be family. It has to be my community and responsibility and service.
“I have to live by those principles every single day as I go through and lead this organization,” he said of his mission at the FMCSA. “We have a lot of work to do. We’ve done a lot of work over the last few months, but that’s just the beginning of the things that we have planned and the things that we need to do to help clean up the mess.”
At the very foundation of the trucking industry are the drivers — and the educational facilities that provide training before these men and women hit the road behind the wheel of an 80,0000-pound tractor-trailer.
The FMCSA requires all would-be CDL holders to complete standard entry-level driver training before they ever climb behind the wheel of a commercial vehicle — and that this training be conducted by a legitimate provider.
“But as we found out real quick after I got here, that’s a problem,” Barrs said. Some providers were not meeting those standards. Some could not demonstrate that the training was even being delivered.”
As of March 2, 2026, he says, the FMCSA has removed more than 7,000 providers from the agency’s training registry and is continually working to remove what he describes as “bad actors.”
“To be honest with you, I would just as soon go through and just clear all of them out and start all over again,” he said. “We have a systematic problem here that we have to work through to ensure … we are putting the right drivers behind the wheel of commercial motor vehicles.”
Ensuring that CDL holders receive proper preparation and training is vital to laying the foundation for a safe, efficient trucking industry. To that end, Barrs says, professional drivers deserve real training, not just a paper certificate.
“Training is where professionalism begins; it’s the foundation,” Barrs said. “If the foundation is weak, the structure above it is also compromised.”
“Carriers deserve confidence that when they hire a newly licensed driver, the driver has been properly trained,” he said. “Everyone traveling on local American roads deserves assurance that when someone earns a CDL, it represents real competency.
“The truckload sector is too important to allow weak standards and there’s more work to be done,” he continued.
Barrs stressed that earning a commercial driver’s license (CDL) is an accomplishment that should not be taken lightly.
“We all understand — or we should understand — that your CDL actually should mean something,” he said, noting that “fly-by-night” training providers and less-than-reputable carriers give the entire industry a bad name.
“Your CDL should represent real training, real qualifications, real competency — and it must be issued in a way that is consistent resistant to fraud,” he said.
To read full coverage of Barr’s March 2, 2026, address, click here.
Dana Guthrie is an award-winning journalist who has been featured in multiple newspapers, books and magazines across the globe. She is currently based in the Atlanta, Georgia, area.
