The proposed CDL restrictions could pull hundreds of thousands of drivers off the road, but the recertification bottleneck may be the bigger story.
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The proposed CDL restrictions could pull hundreds of thousands of drivers off the road, but the recertification bottleneck may be the bigger story.
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On the evening of June 20, 2024, a tractor-trailer barreled into stopped traffic on a California highway at 60 miles per hour. Dalilah Coleman was five years old and riding in one of the cars. She survived, but with catastrophic injuries: a traumatic brain injury, skull fractures, a broken femur and a diagnosis of diplegic cerebral palsy that has left her, now seven, nonverbal and relearning how to walk. The driver, Partap Singh, held a California-issued CDL despite being in the country illegally. ICE arrested him in August 2025 and deported him to India the following month.
That crash is now driving what could be the biggest rewrite of CDL eligibility since the ELD mandate. The bill would redraw the lines from scratch, and if it passes as written, every carrier, broker and shipper in the country will feel it in their rates.
Senator Jim Banks of Indiana introduced the Dalilah Law in late February. Representative Andy Barr filed a companion bill, H.R. 7758, in the House. A second House version, H.R. 7793, came from Representatives Houchin, Fong and Obernolte. President Trump called for its passage during his State of the Union on Feb. 24, with the Coleman family seated in the gallery.
The provisions are blunt. CDL eligibility would be restricted to U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents and holders of H-2A, H-2B or E-2 visas. Everyone else gets their license revoked. CDL testing goes English-only. And every CDL holder in America, all 3.5 million of them, would need to recertify within 180 days.
Nobody agrees, which is part of why this is hard to price.
Bureau of Labor Statistics data puts the foreign-born share of U.S. truck drivers at roughly 18%, or about 630,000 people. Many of them are naturalized citizens or green card holders who'd be fine under the Dalilah Law. FMCSA's estimate is narrower and more concrete: its non-domiciled CDL final rule, published Feb. 13, found that 97% of the roughly 200,000 current non-domiciled CDL holders won't qualify under the new eligibility rules. Going forward, the agency expects to issue about 6,000 non-domiciled CDLs a year. The spigot gets turned down to a trickle.
That rule took effect March 16. California got a preview on March 6, when 13,000 non-domiciled CDLs were canceled in a single day. FMCSA also withheld roughly $160 million in federal highway funding from the state for noncompliance. The enforcement, in other words, is not theoretical.
But the FMCSA rule only covers non-domiciled licenses. The Dalilah Law goes wider. FreightWaves has estimated that the bill could affect upward of 600,000 drivers once you factor in the English-only testing mandate and the sweeping revocation language. That's north of 15% of the entire CDL-holding population.
And the geography is uneven. In California, nearly 47% of truck drivers are foreign-born. In the LA metro, the number is 52%. Chicago sits at 30%, New Jersey at 35%. If you're a broker moving loads out of the Inland Empire or through the port of Newark, you don't need the national average to worry you. Your local math already does.
Most of the industry coverage has focused, reasonably enough, on the revocation numbers. But buried in the Dalilah Law's text is a provision that could do just as much damage to available capacity, and it would affect citizen drivers who aren't at any risk of losing their licenses.
Every CDL holder in the country has to recertify within 180 days.
ATRI's latest demographic data shows Baby Boomers still make up 20.7% of the truck driver workforce. The average owner-operator is 56 years old. Gen Z accounts for 7.5% of drivers. The generation heading for retirement outnumbers the generation entering the cab by nearly three to one. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 237,600 annual openings for heavy-truck drivers over the next decade, and the vast majority of those openings reflect retirements and people leaving the profession rather than freight volume growth.
The industry is losing 6-7% of its drivers every year to natural attrition. Before the Dalilah Law pulls a single CDL off the road.
The replacement pipeline isn't keeping up. Three years of a freight recession, from 2022 through 2025, crushed rates and chased prospective drivers toward construction, warehousing, last-mile delivery, anything that paid comparably without demanding weeks away from home. The CDL training pipeline was already running thin going into 2026. Now the Dalilah Law proposes to drain the existing pool while retirement continues hollowing it out from the other side.
This is the part of the "super cycle" thesis that deserves more scrutiny. FreightWaves and others have framed the Dalilah Law as a supply shock: remove drivers, rates spike. Probably right, as far as it goes. But supply shocks, by definition, imply a recovery. Prices rise, the market adjusts, new supply enters, things normalize. The demographic picture makes that recovery timeline much longer than a typical freight cycle. You can't train 200,000 new citizen drivers in a quarter. The CDL pipeline has its own throughput limits, and the pay has to get good enough to pull 25-year-olds away from construction and warehouse gigs. That's a years-long fix for a problem that arrives in months.
The rate outlook depends on which version of this story plays out. We see three plausible scenarios.
In the first, Congress passes the Dalilah Law largely as written and enforcement begins before the industry can absorb the shock. A 10-15% contraction in available drivers, layered onto a market where OTRI is already near 15%, would likely push spot rates 25-40% above current levels within two to three quarters. Carrier wages surge. Sign-on bonuses blow past anything since the pandemic. Small fleets that barely survived the downturn become selective about loads for the first time in years. Call this the FreightWaves "super cycle" scenario, and it is directionally plausible.
In the second, the bill stalls while executive enforcement continues at its current pace. The FMCSA rule removes roughly 200,000 non-domiciled CDL holders over 12-18 months, but the broader revocation and recertification provisions never take effect. Rates still tighten, since you're losing perhaps 5-6% of capacity in an already lean market, but the move is more gradual, closer to a normal cyclical upturn than a supply shock.
In the third, legislative and enforcement momentum fades. Court challenges or political horse-trading water down the FMCSA rule, Congress moves on, and the status quo largely holds. Rates follow normal seasonal patterns. We view this as the least likely outcome given the current political alignment, but it is the implicit bet if you're ignoring this story.
What separates all three from a typical freight cycle is the demographic overlay. Even in the mildest scenario, the Boomer retirement wave continues pulling 6-7% of drivers out annually with no proportional replacement pipeline. Recovery timelines after any supply shock will be longer than the industry is accustomed to. The replacement drivers are not in the pipeline yet.
OTRI near 15% tells you carriers are already rejecting a material share of contracted loads. Tender rejections at that level usually precede spot rate moves. Whether those levels hold through the summer depends on how fast regulatory contraction stacks onto normal seasonal tightening. That is what our OTRI market for Q3 2026 is tracking.
One qualifier on the consumer side: trucking freight is typically under 4% of a finished product's retail price. A doubling of rates, which would be extraordinary, would add less than 1% to headline CPI. For carriers and brokers, the Dalilah Law would reshape their economics for years. At the checkout counter, the effect would be negligible.
The political tailwinds are strong. Trump made the bill a State of the Union set piece. It has companion bills in both chambers. The Commercial Vehicle Training Association endorsed it, and so did OOIDA. South Dakota's governor signed aligned legislation on March 10.
American Trucking Associations has endorsed the USDOT enforcement actions and called for audits of non-domiciled CDL issuance, but has so far stopped short of endorsing the Dalilah Law bill itself. ATA's language has been carefully scoped to "credentialing standards" and "consistent enforcement."
The headwinds are procedural. Congress is slow even when the politics are easy. Committee markups, floor scheduling, reconciliation if it gets bundled into a larger package — all of this takes months. Meanwhile, the executive branch keeps delivering wins without legislation: the FMCSA rule is in effect, the English-only order is in effect, California lost $160 million in highway funding for dragging its feet. NPR reported on March 12 that the administration's trucking crackdown is accelerating. Every enforcement action the White House banks on its own gives Senate leadership one more reason to allocate floor time elsewhere.
Our read: passage by year-end is probable but far from certain. The political will exists, but the legislative calendar is crowded and the executive branch is already accomplishing much of what the bill would mandate. The more interesting question for freight professionals may be whether the distinction between legislative and executive action matters for rates — and for most carriers, it does not. The capacity contraction is underway regardless.
We have a market on this: Will the Dalilah Law be signed into law in 2026? It resolves on the legislation, not the executive actions. Make the call.
Your prediction, your reputation.
Subscribe to Rig Load Report
Get weekly freight market analysis in your inbox.
Rig Load is an independent platform for exploring expectations around freight-related outcomes. Content is for informational purposes and does not constitute professional advice.
Rig Load. All rights reserved.
On the evening of June 20, 2024, a tractor-trailer barreled into stopped traffic on a California highway at 60 miles per hour. Dalilah Coleman was five years old and riding in one of the cars. She survived, but with catastrophic injuries: a traumatic brain injury, skull fractures, a broken femur and a diagnosis of diplegic cerebral palsy that has left her, now seven, nonverbal and relearning how to walk. The driver, Partap Singh, held a California-issued CDL despite being in the country illegally. ICE arrested him in August 2025 and deported him to India the following month.
That crash is now driving what could be the biggest rewrite of CDL eligibility since the ELD mandate. The bill would redraw the lines from scratch, and if it passes as written, every carrier, broker and shipper in the country will feel it in their rates.
Senator Jim Banks of Indiana introduced the Dalilah Law in late February. Representative Andy Barr filed a companion bill, H.R. 7758, in the House. A second House version, H.R. 7793, came from Representatives Houchin, Fong and Obernolte. President Trump called for its passage during his State of the Union on Feb. 24, with the Coleman family seated in the gallery.
The provisions are blunt. CDL eligibility would be restricted to U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents and holders of H-2A, H-2B or E-2 visas. Everyone else gets their license revoked. CDL testing goes English-only. And every CDL holder in America, all 3.5 million of them, would need to recertify within 180 days.
Nobody agrees, which is part of why this is hard to price.
Bureau of Labor Statistics data puts the foreign-born share of U.S. truck drivers at roughly 18%, or about 630,000 people. Many of them are naturalized citizens or green card holders who'd be fine under the Dalilah Law. FMCSA's estimate is narrower and more concrete: its non-domiciled CDL final rule, published Feb. 13, found that 97% of the roughly 200,000 current non-domiciled CDL holders won't qualify under the new eligibility rules. Going forward, the agency expects to issue about 6,000 non-domiciled CDLs a year. The spigot gets turned down to a trickle.
That rule took effect March 16. California got a preview on March 6, when 13,000 non-domiciled CDLs were canceled in a single day. FMCSA also withheld roughly $160 million in federal highway funding from the state for noncompliance. The enforcement, in other words, is not theoretical.
But the FMCSA rule only covers non-domiciled licenses. The Dalilah Law goes wider. FreightWaves has estimated that the bill could affect upward of 600,000 drivers once you factor in the English-only testing mandate and the sweeping revocation language. That's north of 15% of the entire CDL-holding population.
And the geography is uneven. In California, nearly 47% of truck drivers are foreign-born. In the LA metro, the number is 52%. Chicago sits at 30%, New Jersey at 35%. If you're a broker moving loads out of the Inland Empire or through the port of Newark, you don't need the national average to worry you. Your local math already does.
Most of the industry coverage has focused, reasonably enough, on the revocation numbers. But buried in the Dalilah Law's text is a provision that could do just as much damage to available capacity, and it would affect citizen drivers who aren't at any risk of losing their licenses.
Every CDL holder in the country has to recertify within 180 days.
ATRI's latest demographic data shows Baby Boomers still make up 20.7% of the truck driver workforce. The average owner-operator is 56 years old. Gen Z accounts for 7.5% of drivers. The generation heading for retirement outnumbers the generation entering the cab by nearly three to one. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 237,600 annual openings for heavy-truck drivers over the next decade, and the vast majority of those openings reflect retirements and people leaving the profession rather than freight volume growth.
The industry is losing 6-7% of its drivers every year to natural attrition. Before the Dalilah Law pulls a single CDL off the road.
The replacement pipeline isn't keeping up. Three years of a freight recession, from 2022 through 2025, crushed rates and chased prospective drivers toward construction, warehousing, last-mile delivery, anything that paid comparably without demanding weeks away from home. The CDL training pipeline was already running thin going into 2026. Now the Dalilah Law proposes to drain the existing pool while retirement continues hollowing it out from the other side.
This is the part of the "super cycle" thesis that deserves more scrutiny. FreightWaves and others have framed the Dalilah Law as a supply shock: remove drivers, rates spike. Probably right, as far as it goes. But supply shocks, by definition, imply a recovery. Prices rise, the market adjusts, new supply enters, things normalize. The demographic picture makes that recovery timeline much longer than a typical freight cycle. You can't train 200,000 new citizen drivers in a quarter. The CDL pipeline has its own throughput limits, and the pay has to get good enough to pull 25-year-olds away from construction and warehouse gigs. That's a years-long fix for a problem that arrives in months.
The rate outlook depends on which version of this story plays out. We see three plausible scenarios.
In the first, Congress passes the Dalilah Law largely as written and enforcement begins before the industry can absorb the shock. A 10-15% contraction in available drivers, layered onto a market where OTRI is already near 15%, would likely push spot rates 25-40% above current levels within two to three quarters. Carrier wages surge. Sign-on bonuses blow past anything since the pandemic. Small fleets that barely survived the downturn become selective about loads for the first time in years. Call this the FreightWaves "super cycle" scenario, and it is directionally plausible.
In the second, the bill stalls while executive enforcement continues at its current pace. The FMCSA rule removes roughly 200,000 non-domiciled CDL holders over 12-18 months, but the broader revocation and recertification provisions never take effect. Rates still tighten, since you're losing perhaps 5-6% of capacity in an already lean market, but the move is more gradual, closer to a normal cyclical upturn than a supply shock.
In the third, legislative and enforcement momentum fades. Court challenges or political horse-trading water down the FMCSA rule, Congress moves on, and the status quo largely holds. Rates follow normal seasonal patterns. We view this as the least likely outcome given the current political alignment, but it is the implicit bet if you're ignoring this story.
What separates all three from a typical freight cycle is the demographic overlay. Even in the mildest scenario, the Boomer retirement wave continues pulling 6-7% of drivers out annually with no proportional replacement pipeline. Recovery timelines after any supply shock will be longer than the industry is accustomed to. The replacement drivers are not in the pipeline yet.
OTRI near 15% tells you carriers are already rejecting a material share of contracted loads. Tender rejections at that level usually precede spot rate moves. Whether those levels hold through the summer depends on how fast regulatory contraction stacks onto normal seasonal tightening. That is what our OTRI market for Q3 2026 is tracking.
One qualifier on the consumer side: trucking freight is typically under 4% of a finished product's retail price. A doubling of rates, which would be extraordinary, would add less than 1% to headline CPI. For carriers and brokers, the Dalilah Law would reshape their economics for years. At the checkout counter, the effect would be negligible.
The political tailwinds are strong. Trump made the bill a State of the Union set piece. It has companion bills in both chambers. The Commercial Vehicle Training Association endorsed it, and so did OOIDA. South Dakota's governor signed aligned legislation on March 10.
American Trucking Associations has endorsed the USDOT enforcement actions and called for audits of non-domiciled CDL issuance, but has so far stopped short of endorsing the Dalilah Law bill itself. ATA's language has been carefully scoped to "credentialing standards" and "consistent enforcement."
The headwinds are procedural. Congress is slow even when the politics are easy. Committee markups, floor scheduling, reconciliation if it gets bundled into a larger package — all of this takes months. Meanwhile, the executive branch keeps delivering wins without legislation: the FMCSA rule is in effect, the English-only order is in effect, California lost $160 million in highway funding for dragging its feet. NPR reported on March 12 that the administration's trucking crackdown is accelerating. Every enforcement action the White House banks on its own gives Senate leadership one more reason to allocate floor time elsewhere.
Our read: passage by year-end is probable but far from certain. The political will exists, but the legislative calendar is crowded and the executive branch is already accomplishing much of what the bill would mandate. The more interesting question for freight professionals may be whether the distinction between legislative and executive action matters for rates — and for most carriers, it does not. The capacity contraction is underway regardless.
We have a market on this: Will the Dalilah Law be signed into law in 2026? It resolves on the legislation, not the executive actions. Make the call.
Your prediction, your reputation.
Subscribe to Rig Load Report
Get weekly freight market analysis in your inbox.
Rig Load is an independent platform for exploring expectations around freight-related outcomes. Content is for informational purposes and does not constitute professional advice.
Rig Load. All rights reserved.
That's 3.5 million people and roughly 19,400 recertifications a day, spread across 50 state licensing agencies, for six straight months. The bill says almost nothing about what recertification actually involves for a U.S. citizen who already holds a valid CDL. Show up at a state office with a passport? Retake the knowledge test in English? Mail in some paperwork? The legislative text is silent on specifics, and Congress has offered no guidance.
The offices that handle commercial licensing are a small fraction of total DMV locations, and wait times for routine transactions are already measured in hours. Now add a federally mandated wave of millions of recertifications to those same offices, all against the same six-month clock, on top of regular business.
Even in the best case, where recertification for citizens is a rubber stamp, the queue creates problems. An owner-operator whose CDL renewal falls in month three of the window gets stuck behind everyone else racing the deadline. Trucks that should be running freight sit idle while their drivers wait on bureaucracy. Capacity lost to paperwork backlogs rather than eligibility rules.
By the time Congress votes on the Dalilah Law's English-only testing requirement, it may already be moot.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy ordered on Feb. 20 that all CDL exams be administered exclusively in English. Before that directive, the state-by-state variation was staggering. California offered CDL tests in 20 languages. Texas offered two. A handful of states were already English-only. Duffy's order collapsed that patchwork overnight into a single federal standard, bypassing Congress entirely.
This creates an odd dynamic for the bill's supporters. When a bill's most media-friendly provision is already in effect, the legislative urgency fades. Senators have limited appetite for passing laws that merely codify what the executive branch already ordered three months ago. The Dalilah Law's remaining provisions, the mass revocations and the recertification mandate, do still require legislation. But the English-only headline, which is the one that travels furthest on cable news, is already in the rearview mirror.
All of this assumes the driver pool was stable before the Dalilah Law showed up. It was already thinning on its own.
That's 3.5 million people and roughly 19,400 recertifications a day, spread across 50 state licensing agencies, for six straight months. The bill says almost nothing about what recertification actually involves for a U.S. citizen who already holds a valid CDL. Show up at a state office with a passport? Retake the knowledge test in English? Mail in some paperwork? The legislative text is silent on specifics, and Congress has offered no guidance.
The offices that handle commercial licensing are a small fraction of total DMV locations, and wait times for routine transactions are already measured in hours. Now add a federally mandated wave of millions of recertifications to those same offices, all against the same six-month clock, on top of regular business.
Even in the best case, where recertification for citizens is a rubber stamp, the queue creates problems. An owner-operator whose CDL renewal falls in month three of the window gets stuck behind everyone else racing the deadline. Trucks that should be running freight sit idle while their drivers wait on bureaucracy. Capacity lost to paperwork backlogs rather than eligibility rules.
By the time Congress votes on the Dalilah Law's English-only testing requirement, it may already be moot.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy ordered on Feb. 20 that all CDL exams be administered exclusively in English. Before that directive, the state-by-state variation was staggering. California offered CDL tests in 20 languages. Texas offered two. A handful of states were already English-only. Duffy's order collapsed that patchwork overnight into a single federal standard, bypassing Congress entirely.
This creates an odd dynamic for the bill's supporters. When a bill's most media-friendly provision is already in effect, the legislative urgency fades. Senators have limited appetite for passing laws that merely codify what the executive branch already ordered three months ago. The Dalilah Law's remaining provisions, the mass revocations and the recertification mandate, do still require legislation. But the English-only headline, which is the one that travels furthest on cable news, is already in the rearview mirror.
All of this assumes the driver pool was stable before the Dalilah Law showed up. It was already thinning on its own.