My 83-year-old father is a retired truck driver. I often refer to him in this newsletter as “Philosopher-Truck Driver John Ring” because, like most blue-collar men, he has a simple, but clear-minded view of the world.

I was always proud of him because he came home every day smelling like grease. I knew he’d worked hard for our little family. And since this was during the Reagan 80s, I never wanted for anything. Growing up in New Jersey then was exactly as Warren Buffett describes it: like hitting the lottery of life.

I’d sit at the dinner table with my parents and listen to Pop’s expletive-laden summation of his day. From New York drivers to disorganized dispatchers to long waits at warehouses, I was entranced, getting to know what he did all day, every day.

But he never struck me as someone who was just driving goods from one place to another. Though I knew nothing about it, I always thought he was competent. He could explain things like truck axles and engines as if they were part of his own anatomy. You felt safe having a man like Pop driving fully loaded tractor-trailers around your county.

Nowadays, though, too many companies are letting amateurs behind the wheels of these 18-wheeled, 40-ton rolling battering rams, and it’s killing far too many Americans.

Every day, 112 people die on U.S. roads. That's just over the average number of passengers on a domestic flight. Would the USG accept a plane crash every 24 hours? Of course not. Then why does it accept this?

In 2023 alone, 40,901 people were killed, and 2.44 million were injured in U.S. crashes. Fatalities are still 26% above their 2011 historic low. Safety groups call it an ongoing public health crisis. But let’s call it what it is: a national embarrassment.

The worst part is truck drivers who can’t read English road signs are responsible for a large portion of the butcher’s bill.

The Driver Shortage

The worst-kept secret about American trucking is there aren't enough qualified drivers.

The average driver age is around 58, meaning the workforce is aging out fast. There have been over 100,000 drug and alcohol violations in roughly 20 months, which rightly disqualify drivers from the road.

An aging workforce mixed with mass disqualifications and freight that still needs to move? When desperate carriers need to fill seats, they lower the bar… all the way to the ground.

What Are Chameleon Carriers?

Enter the chameleon carrier.

Like hedge funds with bad track records, these chameleon carriers are trucking firms that shut down after racking up poor safety records, then reopen under new names to escape scrutiny.

In plain English: A carrier builds a terrible safety record. Regulators close in. Then the company shuts down and forms a new LLC overnight. The same drivers, the same trucks, and the same reckless management are back on your highway the next day.

According to analytics firm Fusable, these firms are 4x more likely to be involved in a severe crash.

A WFAA/TEGNA (an ABC affiliate in Dallas) investigation tied dangerous practices like chameleon carriers and double brokering directly to rising highway fatalities in Texas. They found unqualified trucks and drivers are getting on the road with little oversight, putting everyday licensed motorists at risk.

Double brokering is when a shipper hires a carrier to move freight. Then that carrier passes the load to someone else—another freight broker or an unvetted carrier—without telling the shipper, often misrepresenting who’s actually hauling the freight. This creates a hidden middleman layer, which may mean no one has vetted the actual hauling truck for safety, insurance, or authority. And the hauling carrier may not get paid, triggering disputes, liens, or cargo holds.

Federal officials, including Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs, have promised a crackdown on Commercial Driver’s License (CDL) mills, invalid CDLs, and chameleon carriers. Promised. That's Washington for "we noticed, and we're very concerned."

During the interval between promise and action, people die.

CDL Mills and the Paper License Problem

Chameleon carriers don't just need new names. They need drivers. Fast.

That's where CDL mills come in. These are schools that churn out commercial driver's licenses with minimal real training. Pair a fresh CDL from a cut-rate mill with a carrier that just "restarted" under a new name, and you have a recipe for catastrophe.

The federal government has known about this for years. The crackdown is only now arriving, which means the problem has been festering in plain sight.

Illiterate Truck Drivers

Then there's the issue nobody wants to say out loud.

Federal rules have long required commercial drivers to read, speak, and understand English well enough to read road signs, converse with officials, keep logs, and assist in emergencies.

Long required. Not always enforced.

There is no formal English test — proficiency is evaluated informally through CDL written and road tests and roadside inspections, with drivers only needing basic trucking English, not fluency. (Editor’s Note: the same rules apply in Italy for regular driver’s licenses, which is why I’m still studying for mine. I can’t take the test in English.) That vague standard, combined with years of lax enforcement, created a gray market. Carriers could hire foreign drivers with minimal English and hope they slipped through.

A 2025 executive order tightened enforcement of existing language rules, after years in which enforcement had been relaxed, allowing non-English-speaking drivers to keep operating despite language-related infractions.

An executive order was necessary. That’s how useless Congress has been about this issue (and many others, of course).

As of June 25, 2025, officers can place any driver who cannot demonstrate sufficient English proficiency immediately out of service at the roadside. That’s a decent start.

Wrap Up

The solutions aren't complicated. Hard English standards. Public blacklists for chameleon carriers. Criminal penalties for double-brokering fraud. Mandatory data checks before any carrier can re-enter the market. Long sentences for company executives, not just the truck drivers.

What's complicated is the will to do it. Freight needs to move. Lobbyists need to lobby. And the bodies keep piling up at 112 a day.

But the problem is being managed. And managing a crisis is just a polite way of accepting it.