On Aug. 7, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced a rule that never should have needed writing down: If you cannot read an English highway sign, you have no business piloting an 80,000-pound truck on an American interstate. Since Duffy’s crackdown began, more than 26,000 drivers have been pulled off the road for failing basic English proficiency checks. As a designated expert witness who testifies in court about whether someone met a duty of care owed to the public, I can tell you this one is not a close call.
Federal law has required English proficiency for commercial drivers since 1937. That is not a typo. This is not some new invention dreamed up to score points; the requirement predates the modern interstate system and survived every administration until 2016, when the Obama Department of Transportation quietly instructed roadside inspectors to stop issuing out-of-service citations for failing the standard. Citations only, no consequences, and the trucks kept rolling.
In the early 1990s, I earned my California EMT certification after years working in private security. You learn fast that safety rules written in blood get diluted by people who never had to sweep up after the wreck. The 2016 memo is a case study in that gap. Inspectors logged 410 English-proficiency violations in fiscal 2024 alone under the watered-down standard, a number that was well below the reality because inspectors were told that citations, not out-of-service orders, were the ceiling. Investigators later tied fatal crashes in Florida and Colorado to drivers who could not read warning signs or communicate with police at the scene. EMTs and cops work those scenes. Bureaucrats just write the memos.
Duffy rescinded the Obama-era memo and restored automatic out-of-service enforcement in April 2025, matching an executive order from President Donald Trump. Guidance dies with the administration that wrote it, which is exactly why FMCSA now wants to move the standard from enforcement policy into a codified regulation, the kind that takes a full rulemaking process, not a memo, to undo.
Some critics will call this a dog whistle aimed at “migrant truckers.” I’d invite them to read the actual text. The rule applies to every commercial driver on American roads, foreign-born or domestic, and it always has. Nobody is asked to recite an oath of allegiance. They are asked to read a sign that says, “Steep Grade” or “Runaway Truck Ramp” before releasing the air brakes on a loaded rig rolling downhill toward a school zone. As Duffy put it, drivers who cannot read road signs are “unqualified to operate 80,000-pound big rigs on America’s highways.” Hard to argue with that unless your business model depends on nobody asking questions.
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If a legal challenge comes, it won’t be a constitutional claim. Trucking associations and immigration advocates will more likely argue under the Administrative Procedure Act, claiming that the FMCSA failed to build an adequate record or defined “proficiency” too vaguely for consistent enforcement. Courts reviewing that kind of claim ask whether the agency examined the relevant evidence and explained a rational connection between its findings and its rule, not whether a judge would have written it differently. FMCSA is walking into that fight with 26,000 documented out-of-service cases, an unbroken regulatory history dating to 1937, and named fatal crashes tied to the old, weaker standard. That is not an agency flying blind.
I coached hurdles and sprints for years. The first thing you teach a kid is that lane markers exist so runners can move fast without colliding, not to slow anyone down. Highways run on the same logic, just at 70 miles per hour instead of 10 seconds flat. I have family members who drive on interstates every week, and I don’t want the driver next to them to guess what “Merge Left” means. Support the rule during its comment period, and remind anyone who calls it “heartless” that death is permanent.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.