Suplicium Transport LLC told the federal government it runs one truck. Its registration with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration lists a single power unit and a single driver, operating out of Springfield, Illinois. In the same reporting period, roadside inspectors stopped Suplicium’s trucks 801 times in 46 states, on 675 different vehicle identification numbers. No single truck is inspected 801 times across 46 states in a year. The figure on the registration was never a count of equipment. It was the basis for an insurance premium.

Suplicium is one of 32 motor carriers that, taken together, report 38 power units to FMCSA. Inspection records tied to those 32 authorities account for 6,082 unique VINs across 7,505 inspections, with some carriers appearing in as many as 46 states. That works out to roughly 160 vehicles on the road for every truck on the books, and the vehicles do not stay with one company. They circulate.

A migration into the slow lane

The pressure on long-haul Class 8 trucking has built steadily over the past year and a half. English-language proficiency is again an out-of-service violation. The rules on non-domiciled commercial licenses are tightening. The electronic logging mandate closed the hours-of-service gaps that thin-margin carriers once relied on. For an operator built on cheap drivers, light paperwork and a minimum policy, long-haul stopped paying.

Many of those operators moved into hotshot and auto transport. A one-ton pickup pulling a car-hauler attracts fewer inspections than a tractor-trailer, and its insurance costs a fraction of a Class 8 fleet’s. The equipment is also easy to move. A pickup and a gooseneck trailer can be retitled, replated and run under a new limited liability company in a matter of days.

The shift shows up in the equipment. Of roughly 500 vehicles that appear under more than one carrier in this network, 46 percent are Ford and Ram pickups and another 14 percent are Kaufman-style car-hauler trailers. Almost none are heavy freight trucks. The timing tracks the broader auto-haul market. When Jack Cooper, a 97-year-old unionized auto hauler, shut down in early 2025 after losing its Ford and General Motors contracts, the finished-vehicle freight it carried did not disappear. It dispersed down the chain into smaller carriers, and some of those carriers are in this group.

The network is also recent. Twenty-six of the 32 carriers hold DOT numbers issued recently enough to date their authority to 2023 or later, and 21 trace to 2024 and 2025. Their insurance filings follow the same line, with 26 of the most recent policies bound during 2025, most in the spring and summer. This is a wave that formed over the past 18 months and had already generated thousands of inspections before the connections between the companies became visible.

Tenure, or the lack thereof, is where the system is weakest. A newly authorized carrier enters an 18-month new-entrant window during which FMCSA is supposed to run a safety audit before the authority becomes permanent. The problem is arithmetic. The agency processes well over 150,000 new carrier registrations a year and cannot audit a meaningful share of them inside that window. A carrier that draws scrutiny, fails a new entrant review, or has its authority headed for revocation does not have to fight it. It can let that DOT number lapse and file for a fresh one, and the clock starts over with a clean record and another 18 months of runway. The vehicles, the drivers and the people behind them carry forward. Only the identifier changes. A cluster of authorities that are almost all a year or two old is the signature of operators who treat the DOT number as disposable, and who reach for a new one the moment an old one becomes a liability.

The same truck, different doors

The clearest evidence is the shared VIN. One Ford F-350, carrying Illinois plate DRL6327, was inspected 15 times under seven different carrier DOT numbers in 12 states. The most-inspected unit in the set, another Ford on plate P1295664, drew 17 stops across a dozen states. Across the network, single vehicles surface under three, four, five, and six separate authorities. These aren’t driveaway towaway, these are real freight carriers. 

The plates swap too. A carrier running its own equipment shows roughly one tag per truck. These carriers show more plates than trucks. Sakara LLC, registered to two power units in Otis Orchards, Washington, accounts for 682 VINs wearing 695 plates. Suplicium shows 681 plates on 675 VINs. Cobra Inc shows 303 plates on 288 VINs. At the level of an individual vehicle, the pattern is insane. One car-hauler turned up under four carriers wearing eight different plates across 14 inspections, most of them near-identical variations on a single Illinois number with a Maine tag mixed in. Others ran on plates reading APPLIED, TEMP, or NOTAG. A trooper at the scale and a toll camera on the interstate both read the plate, not the VIN, so a shifting or temporary tag breaks the link between a violation and the truck that earned it.

The rotation serves a purpose. Spreading inspections and violations across many DOT numbers keeps any single carrier from accumulating the record that triggers an FMCSA intervention. The safety scores stay clean because no one company carries the full history. A bad inspection under one authority is followed by the next inspection under another. After a crash, the vehicle can be tied to whichever entity has the most favorable standing at that moment. In recent attempts to avoid the most active USDOT and FMCSA in history, which is hot on their trail, the answer is to run with no tag at all. 

One carrier anchors the group. Auto Haul Express LLC, registered to a single truck in La Grange, Illinois, under officer Olha Kurilovych, appears on 225 of the roughly 500 shared vehicles, close to half the entire crossover set. A second company by the same name, under a different DOT number, is registered to Oleg Shevchenko in Nine Mile Falls, Washington, inside the network’s western cluster. The highest-ratio carrier in the set, Suplicium, lists officer Jamshedjon Ismailov Sr. at a Springfield address while showing a separate officer address in Brooklyn. Its closest equipment partner, Sakara, is run by Ara Sarkisyan, who also controls a second carrier, Rideon LLC, in the same Washington area.

How the companies connect

Secretary Sean Duffy described the problem in nearly the same terms in February, when he said the government cannot allow 200 DOT numbers to trace back to a single post office box.

The ownership ties show up in the people. Anton Mapin, listed on Tsar Transportation in Illinois, also appears on an entity in Connecticut. Gulbakhor Mukhammadieva, on LBS Logistics, also controls a second Illinois carrier. Ara Sarkisyan runs both Sakara and Rideon in eastern Washington. Officer-name matching has limits, since common names collide, but distinctive names recurring across separate authorities are the kind of link a phone-number or address query never catches. The equipment is shared, the formation infrastructure is shared, and a handful of operators turn up again and again behind nominally unrelated companies.

Run as a network rather than a list, the structure is hard to argue with. The carriers that share equipment resolve into a single connected web, not a set of unrelated one-truck firms, and that web breaks down into three tighter operating cells. The same Auto Haul Express that anchors the equipment sits at the center of the network by every measure of connectedness. Tested against a model that randomly reshuffles the same vehicles across the same carriers, the volume of equipment these companies share comes in roughly 20 standard deviations above what chance would produce. A result three standard deviations from the mean is already treated as no coincidence. This is far past that. The shared iron is not an artifact of a busy used-truck market.

The web also has a geography. Of the carriers in and around this network, just under half are registered in Illinois, and another one in seven is in Ohio. The two states together account for nearly 60 percent of the group. Within Illinois, the addresses bunch even tighter, in the Chicago suburbs of Schaumburg, Hoffman Estates, Palatine, Arlington Heights and the registered-agent suites of Springfield. A second pole sits in eastern Washington, around Spokane. When the formation addresses are traced outward to every carrier that shares them, the same suites recur: a single address in Canton, Ohio, ties to 16 carriers, a Spokane suite to a dozen more, a Fargo address to several others in the network. The officers carry the same concentration. The recurring names on these authorities are overwhelmingly Eastern European and Central Asian, the same handful surfacing across nominally unrelated companies and clustered in the same metro areas. That pattern, the same kind of operator forming the same kind of carrier through the same suites in the same cities, is what a list of 236 individual registrations hides and a network map shows.

A number that does not survive

Every carrier files a form called the MCS-150, on which it reports its mileage and truck count. Those two figures are what regulators and insurers use to size a carrier’s exposure, and neither is checked against anything.

In this group, the mileage figure collapses on inspection. Five carriers reported driving exactly one mile for the year. One of them is Auto Haul Express, the same company that appears in 749 inspections across 43 states. Three others reported between 2.9 million and 15.3 million miles on one or two trucks, a figure no truck can produce, since even a hard-run unit covers about 130,000 miles a year. The remaining 21 carriers reported no mileage at all. Of the 32, only one reported a number in a believable range.

The truck count tells the same story in shorthand. One unit, one unit, one unit, against a footprint that crosses the country.

Two insurers, then none

Premium is built on one self-declared truck. The actual exposure is hundreds of vehicles operating under that authority, in dozens of states, driven by people the underwriter never evaluated. The carrier was priced as one truck and is running a fleet.

These carriers are not insured by obscure offshore programs. They are insured by some of the largest names in the business. Of the 32 carriers’ most recent filings, companies in the Progressive group wrote 59 percent and companies in the GEICO group wrote another 28 percent, most through the kind of fast-issue commercial-auto programs that bind coverage off a self-reported application.

The policies are short-lived. Across the group, the filing history shows coverage that rarely lasts a full quarter, with a median of 92 days before cancellation. One policy ran for five days. One was bound and canceled the same day. The same rhythm repeats company to company: bind a minimum policy, run the fleet for a few months, let it lapse, rebind with another insurer. One carrier has moved through nine insurers this way.

Eight entities no longer hold any active authority, having been put out of service by the agency, as the next section lays out. This is the end state that the bind-and-lapse pattern was always heading toward.

The limits sit at the federal floor or just above it, $750,000 for most of the group and $1 million for the rest. A $750,000 policy meets the law on paper. It was priced for one truck and is backed by a fleet that renews its coverage every few months. The MCS-90 endorsement attached to these filings requires the insurer to pay an injured member of the public even when the policy would otherwise deny the claim, so the loss lands on the carrier’s insurer at a multiple of the premium it collected. The insurer recovers it in the only way it can: by raising rates across its entire book. A carrier running 50 trucks and insuring all 50 ends up subsidizing the one that reported a single truck and ran hundreds of trucks. Commercial auto insurance has lost money on underwriting for more than a decade, and fleet-count fraud is part of it, the part no one measures, because the federal government never reconciles the reported number against the road.

A floor set in 1980

The minimum these carriers meet was written for a different industry. The $750,000 liability requirement for general freight was set by the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 and has not been raised since. Adjusted for inflation, it would exceed $2.8 million today. FMCSA itself told Congress that if the figure had merely tracked medical inflation, it would sit above $3 million. The agency opened a rulemaking to raise it in 2014 and abandoned that effort in 2017 after industry opposition from the ATA and OOIDA. OOIDA runs its own Risk Retention Group, so there are obvious reasons why they would not favor a minimum increase. I’d argue that an Association that’s testifying to policymakers on “behalf of drivers” while owning a risk retention group shouldn’t be able to testify that it doesn’t want its minimum coverage limits increased. Call me old-fashioned, but there seems to be a conflict there. Not to mention, it calls into question whether they are testifying in these insurance minimum considerations in the interest of their driver base or in their own interests? 

Below the general freight line, the floor drops further. A carrier hauling non-hazardous freight in vehicles rated under 10,001 pounds owes $300,000, and a property carrier whose vehicles fall under that weight is exempt from the federal minimum altogether unless it hauls specific regulated goods. Hotshot work sits right on that boundary. A one-ton dually pulling a loaded car-hauler clears 10,001 pounds easily, which means operators who file at the lower tier or claim the exemption are often misclassified, and no one checks.

The thread running through it all is self-attestation. The carrier sets its own truck count, its own mileage, and, by classifying its own weight, its own insurance tier. Three numbers, all chosen by the party with the most reason to understate them, all accepted on faith by the regulator and the insurer. That made sense when the only way to count a carrier’s trucks was to ask. It does not now.

The crackdown

Enter Sean Duffy, Derek Barrs, the FMCSA investigators and private industry tech. Starting in 2025, this network began to come apart, one authority at a time, and the record of how it came apart is the clearest proof of what it always was.

Almost all of these companies are creatures of the last few years, and the registration records show the front door has never stopped opening. A handful trace to 2021 and 2022. Seven were granted authority in 2024. The single largest wave, 17 of the 32, came in 2025, even as chameleon carriers were drawing national scrutiny. One more, Golla, registered in January 2026. The carriers the agency is shutting down now were, for the most part, admitted to the road over the same stretch of months it spent building the case to remove them. The pattern that should have stopped them was not being read at the point of entry, so they scaled fast, ran up inspections and crashes far beyond what a one-truck operation should generate, and drew a hard audit only after the record was built. The systematic shutdown has intensified over the past year, with the heaviest impact in recent months. Enforcement is catching and closing them in near real time. The registration system is still letting them in.

On November 28, 2025, FMCSA put Auto Haul Express out of service. The order followed a failed new-entrant audit and a denial of access; the carrier would not produce the records the agency asked for. Over the next five months, twelve more of the core carriers fell the same way, nearly all of them for refusing an audit or refusing contact. Sakara went out on December 7. Central Transit’s authority was revoked effective December 8. MLS Capital fell on February 2, 2026; Lipchenko on February 7; DMLCSL and ONEPOINT on March 14; Hauldex on March 16; MTMFO’s authority was revoked effective March 25; Novaline went out on April 6; LCZW on April 24; Golla on April 27; and Shapoval on April 29. Thirteen authorities at the center of the cluster, gone in five months and a day. For those claiming enforcement is not acting, you have no idea how wrong you are until right now. 

That is enforcement at work, and it deserves recognition. The out-of-service tool that took these carriers down is not new, and the loophole they worked sat open for years under administrations of both parties. What changed is the posture. The agency has made unmasking chameleon carriers a stated priority and has paired it with a push to restore the requirement that a carrier keep a real, inspectable place of business. The cluster coming apart on a five-month timeline is what that posture looks like in the data.

The posture now comes with machinery. In late 2025, the agency began phasing in Motus, a rebuilt registration system that adds identity verification and business validation at the front door, the exact point where a reincarnated carrier has always slipped through. It has moved to enforce the principal-place-of-business rule and announced 40 additional investigators. In February 2026, bipartisan legislation, the Safety and Accountability in Freight Enforcement Act, directed the FMCSA to develop and test an automated tool to flag chameleon applications during registration, codifying a data-driven detection approach the government had once funded more than a decade ago and then let idle. The thirteen authorities in this cluster did not come apart on their own. They came apart while the agency was rebuilding the door they had walked through. Administrator Derek Barrs, Secretary Sean Duffy and the Trump Administration are not only shutting the door, but they’re cleaning out the closet at the same time with minimal resources. 

Killing the authority did not take the trucks off the road. It moved them. When Auto Haul Express went out on November 28, its equipment did not park. Within 48 hours, the same vehicle identification numbers were turning up under other carriers in the group. MLS Capital and Central Transit inspected Auto Haul’s trucks on November 29, DMLCSL and Jay Torres on November 30. Over the following weeks, 92 of Auto Haul’s vehicles surfaced under Hauldex, 84 under MTMFO, 72 under DMLCSL, with dozens more spread across Lipchenko, LCZW, Golla, Auto Titi, and Shapoval. The hub authority was dead. Its fleet kept rolling under new numbers.

When Sakara went out nine days later, the pattern repeated at a larger scale. The day after its December 7 shutdown, 236 of Sakara’s VINs began appearing under Hauldex. Another 102 went to Golla, 62 to Richroad, 51 to MTMFO. The trucks did not change. The authority on the paperwork and the door markings did.

As the agency worked down the list, the carriers that had caught the equipment became targets in turn, and the iron moved again. Hauldex absorbed hundreds of vehicles from Auto Haul and Sakara over the winter, and then on March 16, Hauldex itself was put out of service. The next day, 51 of the vehicles that had been running shifted to Golla. Golla’s authority was revoked six weeks later, on April 27. The same trucks had now outlived four separate authorities and were looking for a fifth. Across the cluster, more than 1,300 vehicles passed through carriers that were each, in turn, shut down, equipment walking down a line of shells, every one of them dying behind it.

The newest authorities tell the rest of the story. KDN Transport Group, formed in Charleston, Illinois, and NHX Logistics, formed in Plano, Illinois, were both brand-new carriers in early 2026, each carrying a fresh million-dollar policy. As the older shells were being killed off through the winter and spring, these two were catching their equipment. KDN picked up vehicles from five different out-of-service carriers, with its first inspections dated March 17 through March 25, the most recent in the entire record. NHX took 48 vehicles from the freshly closed MLS Capital. The oldest iron in the network was landing on the youngest authorities, the ones still too new to have drawn an audit.

The plates make it concrete and current. One Illinois tag, 209267F, was read by inspectors on trucks operating under Jay Torres, MTMFO and Golla, three nominally separate carriers, the last reading dated March 24, 2026. A second Illinois plate moved across the same three companies. MTMFO and KDN share more than a dozen tags between them, the most recent seen on March 25. These are the same physical plates moving between active carriers inside the past several weeks, while the enforcement that killed the parent companies was still underway.

That is how fast “chameleon activity” occurs. The agency can revoke an authority, and it is doing so more quickly and deliberately than before. Revocation acts on the number, and the number is the one thing in this network that is disposable. The trucks, the plates, and the people behind them re-form under the next clean authority, and the new-entrant clock starts over. It reforms fast. The same equipment moved within 48 hours of each shutdown, and new authorities were being created even as the old ones were killed. KDN and NHX were formed in January 2026, in the middle of the very enforcement wave that was dismantling the carriers whose equipment they would inherit weeks later. That is the network showing its hand, how quickly it can change names and shift assets to stay a step ahead of the agency and its investigators. Until the reported fleet count is reconciled against the inspection record at the moment a carrier registers, the door the old authorities walked out of stays open for the new ones to walk back in.

What the inspections were finding

Behind the paperwork, the same network incurred more than 17,000 violations in its inspection record. The single most-cited violation across these carriers, appearing at more than half of them and recorded 775 times, is operating a commercial vehicle without a valid commercial driver’s license. In nearly every instance, the driver was placed out of service on the spot. A separate citation for operating without a CDL adds hundreds more. Alongside them sit 380 citations for drivers who could not satisfy the English-language proficiency requirement, again overwhelmingly resulting in an out-of-service order.

The equipment failures track the licensing failures. Hundreds of out-of-service brake violations, missing or inoperable breakaway systems on the trailers, defective brakes exceeding a fifth of the braking system, bald tires below the legal tread depth, and tires leaking or carrying weight past their rated limit. These are the conditions that turn a loaded car hauler into something that cannot stop or stay in its lane. Read together, the violation record describes the predictable result of the fraud on the registration form: when the entity exists only to carry an insurance filing and the trucks are run hard under disposable authorities, no one is checking whether the driver is licensed or whether the brakes work.

The crash record is where it lands. The carriers in and around this network appear in more than 3,000 crashes. The toll is heavily concentrated in the larger fleets the network’s equipment touches, which is its own warning, but even confined to the small one- and two-truck shells at the core, the carriers reporting a single vehicle while running dozens, the record holds hundreds of crashes, dozens of fatalities and hundreds of injuries. Manas Express, which reported two trucks and put more than 360 distinct vehicles through inspections, appears in 240 crashes with five deaths and remains listed as active. This is the public-safety cost of a self-declared fleet count and an authority that can be replaced in an afternoon.

A death at the end of the chain

The cost is not only financial. I have served as an expert witness on multiple fatal interstate crashes that began in exactly this part of the industry, with a hotshot operator. In one case, a pickup pulling a car hauler and a driver who held only a Russian commercial license. The load had been brokered and re-brokered four times through enough hands that establishing who controlled the driver, who dispatched the freight and who was responsible for confirming the driver belonged behind the wheel was nearly impossible. Someone died. The driver had no business operating a commercial vehicle, and the carrier’s reported fleet size bore no relation to what it was actually running. The killer piece of this case specifically wasn’t even the Russian CDL; it was the flashlights mounted to the rear of the trailer serving as marker lamps that ultimately killed a man who didn’t see the trailer and hit it at night. 

That is what the diluted safety score, the lapsed minimum policy, and the layered brokerage add up to on a dark interstate. The structure is built to keep the responsible party out of reach until a death forces someone to trace it back.

The brokers are exposed now

For years, the layering served as both a legal and a practical shield. When a crash led back to a broker who had placed the load with an unsafe carrier, the broker’s defense was federal preemption: the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act of 1994 bars state laws related to a broker’s services, and most courts read that to knock out state negligent-selection claims before they reached a jury. A broker who booked a ghost carrier could argue it was not the law’s business how it chose.

That defense is gone. On May 14, 2026, in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the FAAAA does not preempt state-law claims that a broker negligently selected an unsafe motor carrier. The Court placed those claims inside the statute’s safety exception, which preserves a state’s authority over motor-vehicle safety, reasoning that a broker’s choice of carrier directly determines which trucks and drivers end up on the road. The decision resolved a long-running split among the circuits and applies immediately to pending cases and future ones alike. A broker that books a load with a carrier reporting one truck and running hundreds, with a safety record built on unlicensed drivers and out-of-service brakes, can now be made to answer for that choice in front of a jury.

The catch is that being liable and being able to pay are not the same thing, and freight brokers sit on the wrong side of that gap. A carrier has to carry at least $750,000 in liability coverage, thin as that floor is. A broker carries no liability insurance requirement at all. The only federal financial requirement for a broker is a $75,000 surety bond, which exists to cover unpaid carrier and shipper claims, not to pay out a wrongful-death judgment. Most brokerages are small, and a large share of the market is handled by independent agents operating under their own authority with few assets behind them. So the broker who is most likely to place freight with a ghost carrier, the one not vetting at all, is frequently the one with nothing to collect against when the negligent-selection claim succeeds. Justice Kavanaugh, concurring, noted that the litigation and insurance costs of the decision will be real even for brokers who ultimately win, and that those costs will work their way through the economy. The honest, well-capitalized broker will buy contingent liability coverage and tighten its vetting. The fly-by-night agent will carry the bond, book the cheap carrier and have little to surrender when the case is traced back. Accountability, in other words, lands hardest where there is something to reach, which is not always where the freight was actually placed.

This is the same hole that runs through the entire scheme. A carrier insured at a 1980 minimum, or not insured at all, hauling under an authority that can be discarded and reformed, booked by a broker with a bond and no assets. At every link, the financial responsibility that is supposed to stand behind a loaded truck on a public road has been engineered down to the smallest number the rules allow, or below it.

The fix is a query

The data needed to catch this already exists inside FMCSA. Every inspection record carries the VIN, the plate, the carrier’s DOT number, the date, and the location. Comparing a carrier’s reported truck count with the number of unique VINs that appear in its inspections is a database query. We built one. It runs against millions of records in minutes and finds these groups.

A ratio of 10 vehicles to one reported truck should prompt a review. A ratio of 160 to one should prompt an investigation. An insurer should not be able to bind a one-truck policy for a carrier that already has hundreds of VINs in the federal inspection record without first seeing that record.

There is movement, and it is moving fast. FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs said in February 2026 that unmasking chameleon carriers was a priority and that the agency was restoring enforcement of the requirement that a carrier have a real principal place of business. The reforms announced alongside it would require carriers to keep a physical location where records can be inspected within 48 hours, move English-proficiency violations from out-of-service status to license revocation, and add new rules on suspensions, new-entrant vetting, and broker testing. Motus registration system is now live with identity verification and business validation aimed at the shell entities and ghost offices this network runs on, and Congress has moved to require an automated chameleon-detection tool at the point of registration. Those measures attack the formation mills and the mailbox addresses. They do not yet reconcile the reported truck count with the inspection record, the single step that would expose the fleet-size fraud at the center of this.

The same signals that exposed this cluster, shared VINs, migrating plates, and common formation addresses, are now being read by a layer of tools the agency has brought into its own work. I have worked with the FMCSA on multiple cases like this for some time with my own system, and the FMCSA has also adopted the use of GenLogs, which runs a sensor network that reads plates off the road, and Bluewire, a carrier-risk scoring system, both of which are in active procurement use against the same or similar problems. Paired with the rebuilt Motus registration system, verifying identity and business legitimacy at the front door, the federal government and the private market are, for the first time, reading the same data and arriving at the same carriers. The capability is no longer the missing piece. The will to run it continuously and to act on what it returns has changed.

The floor has to move as well. A bill introduced in the House in April 2026, the Fair Compensation for Truck Crash Victims Act, would raise the minimum to $5 million and index it to inflation so it cannot calcify again for 40 years. The objection will be that it burdens small carriers. The carriers it would actually burden are the ones in this story, reporting one truck and running hundreds, and they are the ones it should. The honest operator already carries at least $1 million in coverage. The fraud carries the minimum, lets it lapse, and leaves the public and every law-abiding carrier to cover the gap.

The agency knows it has taken on more than it can comfortably handle. Administrator Barrs has said as much, that they bit off more than they could chew, and they are going to keep on chewing anyway. In thirteen shuttered authorities and a year of audits, a list of refusers was whittled down; that is what the record looks like. The other side is fast, sprinting to stay one identity ahead. For the first time in my years in this industry, the distance between a fraud and the enforcement that catches it is closing toward real time. Sometimes that level of focus, ambition, and drive is all it takes.

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Dallas-based WWEX Group and shipping software provider Auctane have completed their merger, creating a new company called ShipStation Global that executives say will become one of the industry’s most comprehensive AI-enabled logistics platforms for small and midsize businesses.

The newly formed company combines WWEX Group’s freight brokerage and transportation services network with Auctane’s portfolio of shipping technology products, including ShipStation, Stamps.com, Metapack and Packlink. 

The merged company is backed by private equity firm Thoma Bravo, while CVC Funds and other WWEX investors retain minority stakes.

“Small and mid-sized businesses have been forced to stitch together multiple tools and relationships just to keep up,” ShipStation Global CEO Tom Madine said in a news release. “We’re combining the best AI-powered shipping software in the market with one of the country’s most powerful freight networks.”

The merger creates a logistics platform serving more than 3 million customers and handling over 3 billion shipments annually. ShipStation Global’s network includes more than 75 less-than-truckload carriers, 350 regional, national and international carriers, 600 technology partners and approximately 45,000 truckload carriers. 

The platform connects parcel, LTL, truckload and international shipping services through a single interface.

ShipStation Global’s portfolio includes ShipStation, Stamps.com, Worldwide Express, GlobalTranz, Metapack, Packlink, Unishippers, JEAR Logistics and BLX Logistics. The company will be headquartered in Texas with offices in Dallas and Austin.

Thoma Bravo, one of the world’s largest technology-focused investment firms, acquired WWEX Group in March.

AI driving a new wave of logistics consolidation

The ShipStation Global launch comes amid a surge of mergers and acquisitions across the logistics, supply chain and transportation technology sectors as companies seek to strengthen artificial intelligence capabilities and expand end-to-end service offerings.

One of the most active acquirers this year has been Coupa. In May, the cloud-based spend management platform announced the acquisition of workflow automation startup Tonkean, just days after acquiring intelligent document processing provider Rossum. 

Coupa executives said the deals will help power the company’s growing “agentic trade network,” designed to automate procurement, invoicing and supplier transactions across global supply chains. Financial terms of both acquisitions were not disclosed.

Transportation visibility provider project44 also expanded its AI capabilities in April through the acquisition of LunaPath.ai. 

The all-cash transaction added more than 50 AI agents designed specifically for logistics execution and orchestration, enabling automated tasks such as appointment scheduling, proof-of-delivery retrieval, claims initiation and exception management. project44 executives said the acquisition supports the company’s vision of creating an AI-native supply chain platform.

Echo Global Logistics announced in January that it had agreed to acquire Reno, Nevada-based ITS Logistics, creating a combined company with approximately $5.4 billion in pro forma annual revenue.

 Echo executives said the deal would combine ITS’ specialized logistics solutions with Echo’s technology platform, analytics and AI capabilities while expanding the company’s scale across North America.

Recent Logistics & Supply Chain Mergers and Acquisitions

Acquirer / Merger	Target	Date Announced	Strategic Focus	Deal Value
WWEX Group + Auctane	Merger creating ShipStation Global	June 2026	AI-enabled logistics platform combining freight, parcel and shipping software	Not disclosed
Coupa	Tonkean	May 2026	Workflow orchestration, AI agents, procurement automation	Not disclosed
Coupa	Rossum	May 2026	Intelligent document processing and AI-powered trade workflows	Not disclosed
project44	LunaPath.ai	April 2026	AI agents for logistics execution and supply chain orchestration	Undisclosed all-cash deal
Echo Global Logistics	ITS Logistics	January 2026	Scale expansion, multimodal logistics, AI and transportation technology	Creates combined company with ~$5.4 billion revenue

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The nation’s largest less-than-truckload carrier, FedEx Freight, began trading Monday on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol FDXF. The spinoff from parent FedEx Corp. allows the carrier to approach the market with a narrowed commercial focus. The transaction is also expected to unlock shareholder value at both companies.

The transaction included a pro rata distribution of 80.1% of FedEx Freight’s (NYSE: FDXF) outstanding common stock to FedEx (NYSE: FDX) shareholders. Investors of record as of May 15 received one share of the new standalone company for every two shares of FedEx held. FedEx will keep a 19.9% stake in FedEx Freight, but plans to dispose of the holdings within two years through debt repayment or dividend distributions to shareholders.

FedEx Freight has replaced American Airlines (NASDAQ: AAL) in the Dow Jones Transportation Average (DJTA). The stock has also been included in the S&P 500. FedEx remains in the DJTA and the S&P 500.

Shares of FDXF were off 2.9% to $155.75 in early trading on Monday. Shares of FDX were up 0.8%.

“We move forward as an independent company with a sharpened focus and disciplined strategy to build on our competitive advantages and accelerate profitable growth,” said John Smith, FedEx Freight president and CEO, in a news release. “As the largest pure-play LTL carrier in North America, we will leverage our comprehensive network with more than 26,000 service center doors to deliver cost and service advantages to our customers and capitalize on growth opportunities in high-potential verticals.”

Financial targets outlined at April investor day

“Medium-term” financial expectations were provided at an April investor day in New York City.

The company forecast compound annual growth rates of 4% to 6% for revenue and 10% to 12% for adjusted operating income. The outlook implies high-20% incremental margins at the midpoints of the ranges, assuming 2026 fiscal year baselines of $8.7 billion in revenue and $1.1 billion in adjusted operating income. (The adjusted operating income forecast excludes $500 million in estimated spinoff costs.)

Revenue increases will be driven by higher yields and volumes, with an emphasis on yields. Combined with cost reductions, the improved revenue profile is expected to generate 300 basis points of adjusted operating margin improvement, pushing the company’s operating margin from roughly 12% currently to 15% over the near term. (The company flagged a 50-bp margin headwind from spinoff costs and fees associated with unwinding existing service agreements.)

FedEx Freight now has over 500 dedicated LTL sales reps and is currently targeting small- and midsize shipper accounts, which typically generate higher margins. It is also targeting the healthcare, grocery and energy (data centers) verticals.

The company previously said it has unwound 99% of its bundled-pricing agreements (agreements for customers using both parcel and freight services) to reflect an LTL-specific framework.

On the cost side, it is continuing to optimize its linehaul network and dock operations, and lower its fleet age. Further, tech upgrades are expected to reduce manual touchpoints by 60% in the coming years.

The company’s long-term goal is to generate 50 cents in operating income for each $1 of gross profit.

Annual capex is forecast at just 5% of revenue. For the year ended May 31, plan allocations included equipment (45%), facilities (25%), technology (25%) and “other” (5%). The company will also look to replace its lease-heavy terminal portfolio with owned locations in key markets.

FedEx Freight’s guidance calls for over $1 billion in annual free cash flow. Management previously said the company would exit the transaction with $4.3 billion in debt. It plans to lower gross debt leverage to 2.5x within 12 months while maintaining an investment-grade rating.

FedEx’s LTL origins

FedEx began LTL operations in 1998 with the acquisition of Viking Freight. It acquired American Freightways in 2001 and Watkins Motor Lines in 2006. In 2011, it merged its national (Watkins) and regional (Viking and American Freightways) operations into one network offering priority and economy services.

FedEx Freight has 40,000 employees, 365 terminals (26,000 doors) and 30,000 vehicles (17,000 tractors), generating approximately $9 billion in annual revenue.

More FreightWaves articles by Todd Maiden:

• Hub Group CFO, COO depart following accounting error
• Could Yellow Corp. workers finally get paid?
• Broker liability ruling: Carriers, brokers, analysts weigh in

The post FedEx Freight embarks on journey as standalone LTL carrier appeared first on FreightWaves.

Borderlands Mexico is a weekly rundown of developments in the world of United States-Mexico cross-border trucking and trade. This week in Borderlands Mexico: Thousands of Mexican truckers lose US visas over cabotage violations; US, Mexico complete first round of USMCA review talks; and RealCold expands into pharmaceutical logistics with SCL Cold Chain acquisition.

Thousands of Mexican truckers lose US visas over cabotage violations

More than 3,000 Mexican truck drivers have lost their authorization to enter the U.S. in recent months as federal authorities intensify enforcement of cabotage and visa regulations.

Pedro Lozano Martínez, president of the Nuevo Laredo Freight Carriers Association and a delegate of Mexico’s National Chamber of Freight Transportation (CANACAR), said approximately 3,200 drivers across the border region have had their visas revoked. 

The cancellations have affected carriers operating through major commercial gateways, Lozano said.

“It has been a serious issue in recent weeks,” Lozano told Agencia Rn Noticias. “CANACAR data indicates around 3,200 drivers have been affected along the entire border region.”

According to Lozano, the visa revocations stem from increased coordination between the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), allowing authorities to identify drivers previously flagged for potential cabotage violations. 

Cabotage occurs when a foreign carrier transports freight between two domestic points inside the U.S. without authorization.

“What happened is that the DOT and CBP systems merged, and all operators who had any warnings about possible cabotage were automatically identified,” Lozano said. “CBP is now revoking their visas through the system.”

Drivers often unaware until they reach the border

Lozano said many drivers do not realize their visas have been revoked until they attempt to cross into the U.S.

“The operator doesn’t even realize it unless they check their email,” Lozano said. “When they arrive at the border, the system tells them they must surrender their visa.”

Before the systems were integrated, DOT inspectors could issue warnings or administrative findings related to cabotage during roadside inspections or weigh station checks. Those findings generally did not carry immigration consequences because DOT lacked authority to revoke visas. 

Under the new enforcement framework, carriers say prior warnings are now triggering visa cancellations.

The Otay Mesa Chamber of Commerce warned in an April advisory that hundreds of visas had already been revoked and that enforcement efforts had expanded beyond recent activity to include reviews of alleged violations dating back several years. 

The chamber said federal authorities have placed increased emphasis on cabotage compliance and other visa-related requirements for Mexican commercial drivers.

Border enforcement expands

The recent visa cancellations come amid broader federal enforcement efforts targeting foreign commercial drivers operating in the U.S.

In November, Border Patrol agents in Arizona revoked the border-crossing privileges of two Mexican truck drivers accused of violating cabotage regulations after determining they were hauling freight between domestic U.S. locations. CBP said the drivers were returned to Mexico and their crossing cards were processed for revocation.

Additional enforcement actions documented this year include a Mexican driver whose visa was revoked after authorities alleged he transported commodities from Nogales, Arizona, to Laredo, Texas, in violation of cabotage rules. Another driver was deported after being accused of hauling produce from Arizona to Washington state while operating under a B-1/B-2 visa.

Federal authorities have repeatedly emphasized that violations of transportation, customs and immigration regulations can result in visa revocations, future entry restrictions and other penalties.

Industry warns of capacity constraints

The Otay Mesa Chamber of Commerce said the visa cancellations are likely to reduce the pool of available cross-border drivers and could contribute to delays and higher transportation costs.

“Expect delays and increased pricing in trucking services since there will be a shortage of truck drivers across the U.S.-Mexico border,” the chamber said in its advisory.

Lozano acknowledged that the crackdown has affected international trucking operations but said many displaced drivers are finding employment in Mexico’s domestic freight market, where carriers are also facing a driver shortage.

“It is not people who are losing their jobs,” Lozano said. “They are switching from the United States to Mexico. There is also a great need for operators here.”

Lozano said CANACAR has sought clarification from U.S. authorities and has worked with congressional offices, including that of U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, to better understand the scope of the visa revocations and enforcement policies. He said the situation underscores the need for carriers and drivers to strictly comply with international transportation regulations.

“We have to do things right,” Lozano said. “There will be greater oversight, and that puts us in a more formal competitive position in the international trucking market.”

US, Mexico complete first round of USMCA review talks

The U.S. and Mexico have concluded the first bilateral round of negotiations related to the joint review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), marking an early step in what could become one of the most consequential trade discussions in North America over the next year.

According to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), negotiators meeting in Mexico City focused on reducing the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico and strengthening North American supply chains. Discussions centered on automotive rules of origin, steel and aluminum trade, and economic security issues.

The two countries also discussed enhancing regulatory compatibility in several sectors, including medical devices, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics, as part of broader efforts to strengthen regional manufacturing and supply chain integration.

USTR said additional negotiations are scheduled for June 16-17 in Washington, D.C., where officials will discuss agriculture and maintaining a level playing field for businesses. A third round of talks is planned for the week of July 20 in Mexico City.

The U.S. said it will continue emphasizing that the USMCA should benefit American manufacturers, farmers, ranchers, workers and businesses while addressing concerns about “free-riding from third countries.”

RealCold expands into pharmaceutical logistics with SCL Cold Chain acquisition

Dallas-based RealCold, a cold storage and logistics provider, announced Wednesday that it acquired SCL, a CEIV-certified temperature-controlled logistics provider specializing in pharmaceuticals, medical devices, wine and specialty foods. 

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The acquisition marks RealCold’s entry into pharmaceutical cold chain logistics, a sector requiring strict temperature controls, regulatory compliance and end-to-end shipment visibility. 

SCL brings expertise in continuous temperature monitoring, FDA-registered facilities and chain-of-custody management for temperature-sensitive products, according to a news release. 

The deal also adds pharmaceutical logistics capabilities to RealCold’s national network, which includes more than 61 million cubic feet of temperature-controlled warehouse space and over 180,000 pallet positions across the United States.

Founded in 2022, RealCold operates a national cold chain network serving food retailers, producers and distributors. SCL Cold Chain will continue operating under its existing brand as part of RealCold.

The post Borderlands Mexico: Thousands of Mexican truckers lose US visas over cabotage violations appeared first on FreightWaves.

Two weeks ago, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration flipped the switch on the biggest overhaul of its registration infrastructure in decades. The legacy systems carriers had used for years, including the Unified Registration System, the Licensing and Insurance public filing system, and the FMCSA Portal’s registration functions, were permanently retired at 8:00 PM Eastern on May 14, 2026. In their place came MOTUS, a single centralized platform tied to Login.gov identity verification, built to reduce fraud, tighten control over who can access carrier records, and modernize systems that had been running on infrastructure built decades ago.

That is the official version. The version playing out across social media, compliance forums, and the daily experience of carriers trying to use the thing is considerably less smooth, and the frustration is now loud enough that it has become its own story.

There’s really no underfunding or legal or any kind of excuse at this point. The motus rollout has been unacceptable. It is one of the worst software releases I’ve ever witnessed. https://t.co/xWagwAU0hb

— Garrett (@garrett_makes) May 29, 2026

What Carriers Are Actually Experiencing

Scroll through trucking social media right now and the MOTUS complaints are impossible to miss. They range from exasperated to resigned to darkly funny, and they share a common thread: people who need to use this system to stay compliant cannot reliably get it to work.

One carrier posted a screenshot of the MOTUS site returning a raw error, a JSON response reading “Unauthorized access,” with the question that captures the entire problem: “When are we fixing Motus? This is a consistent message. How do we comply with the rules when the system does not want to work with us?” That question is not rhetorical. It is the practical bind that thousands of carriers and the compliance professionals who serve them are sitting in right now.

Another well-known voice in the compliance community, posting a list of bugs being compiled and sent to FMCSA, did not soften it: “Alright folks, MOTUS is buggy. Like super buggy.” That same person reported building a public bug-tracking site, motusbugs.com, to document the issues in the open and feed them to FMCSA, because the volume of problems being reported by carriers had outpaced any official channel for surfacing them.

The sentiment escalates from there. One user described the rollout as “a total disaster,” saying the agency “dropped the ball and then want to play the ghosting game,” and reported fielding four phone calls in a single day from people who were in the middle of getting their own operating authority when the transition caught them mid-process. Another compliance figure was blunt: “There’s really no underfunding or legal or any kind of excuse at this point. The MOTUS rollout has been unacceptable. It is one of the worst software releases I’ve ever witnessed.”

These are not anonymous complaints from people who do not understand the system. The voices driving this conversation are also compliance professionals, the people who do FMCSA registration work for a living, who understand the old systems intimately, and who are now unable to do their jobs because the new system returns errors instead of access.

Alright folks, MOTUS is buggy. Like super buggy.

We’re working directly with FMCSA on getting them a list of all the bugs that people can find.

So we built https://t.co/v0qGvsSIHy to build a PUBLIC way to see what’s going on.

Lots of data to add over time, but we’re…

— Ben Van Zee (@benvanzee) May 28, 2026

What MOTUS Was Supposed to Do

To understand why the frustration is landing this hard, it helps to understand what MOTUS was built to accomplish and why the agency considered it necessary.

MOTUS, Latin for “movement” or “motion,” is FMCSA’s unified registration platform, designed to replace a fragmented collection of legacy systems with a single dashboard for USDOT number applications, operating authority management, biennial updates, and name and address changes. The project traces back to MAP-21, the surface transportation law passed in 2012, which mandated a modernized registration system that has taken more than a decade to reach launch. The old system was clunky, hard to navigate and a pain. This was supposed to be the ultimate modernization tool that could replace it.

The case for it was real. The old systems were fragmented and their identity controls were weak, and that weakness had become a serious industry problem. Unauthorized account access, fraudulent carrier registrations, fake insurance filings, and chameleon carrier activity, where an operation shuts down under one DOT number to escape its safety record and reopens under another, had all become growing concerns that the aging infrastructure could not adequately police. MOTUS was designed to address exactly those vulnerabilities by tying registration to Login.gov identity verification, requiring document capture and facial verification for individual users, and adding business-verification checks tied to entity records. The Federal Register notice indicated that new applicants and roughly 800,000 existing registrants would complete identity proofing when they first use the system.

The fraud-control rationale matters and it is legitimate. The problem is not the goal, the problem is the execution and the timing.

Why the Timing Makes Everything Worse

The MOTUS rollout did not happen in a vacuum. It landed in the middle of one of the most consequential stretches for carrier compliance in years, and the convergence of events is what has turned a rough software launch into something carriers are experiencing as a genuine threat to their ability to operate.

The May 14 launch coincided almost exactly with a wave of biennial update deadlines, the twice-yearly MCS-150 filings that carriers are required to complete to keep their registration current. Carriers who sat down to knock out a routine ten-minute MCS-150 update found themselves staring at spinning wheels, invalid login messages, and error screens instead. A compliance task that used to be trivial became, for many, impossible to complete during the exact window it was due.

The identity verification architecture created a second-order problem that has caught a particular category of carrier off guard. Under MOTUS, only the designated Company Official using the same Login.gov email tied to the original FMCSA Portal account can claim the company’s MOTUS account for the first time. In a great many small trucking companies, the person who originally set up the Portal account years ago is not the person handling compliance today. The account could be tied to a former employee, a former safety manager, an outside registration service, or an email address nobody has access to anymore. When that is the case, claiming the MOTUS account becomes a support-ticket ordeal at exactly the moment the support queues are overwhelmed.

The scale of that specific problem is documented. FMCSA sent 2.2 million letters to registered users ahead of the transition, and roughly 18%, about 396,000, came back undeliverable. That is nearly 400,000 registered entities whose contact information was already out of date before the new system that depends on accurate contact and identity information went live.

And the recovery paths are slow. A carrier who lost their PIN and needs to recover it through the mail is looking at a seven-to-ten-day delay. Paper filing workarounds, where they exist, have been reported to face processing delays of at least eight business days. For a carrier whose authority or registration status is caught in the transition, those timelines are not abstract. They are days the truck may not be able to move.

FMCSA sent out 2.2 million letters to all motor carrier addresses in the US when they announced the launch of Motus, the new registration system. Over 400,000 of those letters came back as undeliverable. https://t.co/S9AYP8Zft3

— SuperTrucker → (@supertrucker) May 22, 2026

The Connection Carriers Are Drawing to Broader Enforcement

The MOTUS frustration is not happening in isolation, and carriers are connecting it to the broader enforcement environment in ways worth taking seriously.

The same period that produced the MOTUS launch has produced an aggressive FMCSA enforcement posture, including non-domiciled CDL crackdowns, identity verification expansion in the Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse, and a general tightening of the compliance environment. For carriers, the experience is one of being held to an increasingly strict standard by an agency whose own systems are simultaneously failing to function. The carrier’s question, “how do we comply when the system will not let us in“, is sharpened by the fact that the consequences of non-compliance have rarely been higher.

There is a real tension here that the industry frustration is pointing at directly. MOTUS was built in significant part to fight fraud and chameleon carriers, the bad actors who exploit weak identity controls. The carriers being tripped up by the rollout are, in large part, legitimate operators trying to do routine compliance work. When a system designed to catch bad actors is instead blocking good ones from basic registration tasks, the people who feel it most are exactly the people the system was not built to target.

What Carriers Should Actually Do Right Now

Frustration aside, carriers still have to operate, and there are concrete steps that reduce the risk of getting caught in the worst of the transition problems.

Confirm who your Company Official is and what Login.gov email is attached to your FMCSA records before you have an urgent filing to make. This is a common point of failure in the MOTUS transition, and it is far easier to resolve when you are not also up against a deadline. If the designated official is a former employee or an outdated email, start the process of correcting it now rather than discovering the problem when you cannot file.

If you can complete a needed registration action, do it the moment the system lets you rather than waiting. The error messages appear intermittent for many users. Access that works this morning may return an “unauthorized access” screen this afternoon. When the window is open, use it.

Document everything. Screenshot the error messages, note the dates and times, and keep a record of your attempts to comply. In an enforcement environment this strict, a documented good-faith effort to complete a required filing through a malfunctioning federal system is worth having on file if a registration lapse is ever questioned.

Do not attempt to create a new or duplicate account to work around an access problem. Duplicate or improperly claimed accounts create exactly the kind of identity inconsistency the system is designed to flag, and resolving that is harder than resolving the original access issue.

And if you rely on a compliance service or registration professional, understand that they are navigating the same broken system you are. The people compiling public bug lists and feeding them to FMCSA are the professionals in this space. Their frustration is not a sign they are not trying. It is a sign the system is genuinely not working as it should.

The Bigger Question

MOTUS will eventually work. Many large government IT modernizations go through painful launch periods and stabilize over months. Phase 3 of the rollout is explicitly dedicated to continuous improvement based on user feedback, and the bug reports being compiled now will, presumably, feed that process.

But the question carriers are asking right now is the right one to sit with: when a federal agency makes a system mandatory, retires every alternative, ties it to strict compliance requirements with serious consequences for failure, and then the system does not reliably work, where does that leave the small operator who did everything right and still cannot get in?

That is not a software question, it is a fairness question, and it is the one driving the frustration that has turned a registration system rollout into one of the loudest conversations in trucking right now. The carriers raising it are not asking for the modernization to be reversed. They are asking for the agency to acknowledge the problem honestly, fix it quickly, and extend the kind of grace on deadlines and enforcement that the situation plainly calls for while the system that everyone is now required to use is made to actually function. Even if the FMCSA would pick up the phone and not have users on 2 hour long holds, that would be helpful to the masses.

The post “One of the Worst Software Releases I’ve Ever Witnessed.” Users Are Not Holding Back on FMCSA’s New MOTUS System appeared first on FreightWaves.

A notice has been going out to carriers in the C.H. Robinson network, and it is worth reading carefully because of what may sit behind it.

The message, branded under C.H. Robinson and titled “Changes to carrier eligibility,” tells the recipient that their company “exceeds intervention thresholds for C.H. Robinson’s scoring model based on data from the FMCSA.” Effective immediately, the notice states, the account is moved to non-certified status until BASIC scores improve. The carrier loses access to book loads on Navisphere Carrier and through their aligned representative immediately. Loads in transit deliver and get paid as normal. Existing payables process in full. But the ability to book new freight is gone until the safety scores come back into the broker’s acceptable range.

On its face, this reads as a safety policy update. Read against what happened at the Supreme Court two weeks before these notices started circulating, it invites a different question: is the freight brokerage industry beginning to reprice carrier risk in real time, because the legal consequences of getting that risk assessment wrong just changed permanently?

C.H. Robinson has not publicly stated that the eligibility change is connected to the Supreme Court ruling, and the company has not publicly announce additional changes. What follows is an analysis of the ruling, the notice, and the timing; and readers should weigh the connection as a strong inference supported by sequence and mechanism, not as a stated company position.

CHR is referring me to the FMCSA in order to raise my safety score before they can work with me and a lot of other carriers again.

I have 0% OOS/Violations – makes no sense. https://t.co/QCFjMcq21o

— thewastedyears (@Thewastedyea) May 29, 2026

What the Supreme Court Actually Did on May 14

To understand why the C.H. Robinson notice is drawing attention, you have to understand Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC and the decision is more consequential for smaller carriers than almost anything else that has happened in freight this year.

On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously, 9-0, that state-law negligent hiring claims against freight brokers are not preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the opinion. Justice Kavanaugh concurred, joined by Justice Alito. There was no dissent.

The case started with a 2017 crash on Interstate 70 in Illinois. Shawn Montgomery had pulled his vehicle onto the shoulder when a tractor-trailer operated by Caribe Transport II veered off the road and struck him. Montgomery lost his leg. He sued the driver, the carrier, and the freight broker that arranged the load — C.H. Robinson. His claim against the broker was specific: C.H. Robinson negligently selected Caribe Transport when it knew or should have known the carrier posed a safety risk. Montgomery pointed to Caribe’s conditional FMCSA safety rating, with documented deficiencies in driver qualification, hours of service, vehicle maintenance, and crash rate.

For years, brokers defeated claims like this with one argument: federal preemption. The FAAAA bars state laws “related to a price, route, or service” of a broker, and brokers argued that negligent selection claims fell under that bar. The district court agreed., the Seventh Circuit agreed then the Supreme Court took the case and reversed everyone.

Barrett’s reasoning was direct. The FAAAA contains a safety exception that preserves “the safety regulatory authority of a State with respect to motor vehicles.” Requiring C.H. Robinson to exercise ordinary care in selecting a carrier, Barrett wrote, “concerns motor vehicles; most obviously, the trucks that will transport the goods.” That puts the negligent hiring claim inside the safety exception, which saves it from preemption. The shield brokers had relied on for years was gone in a unanimous decision that legal analysts described as fitting its core reasoning “on a napkin.”

The practical effect: a broker can now be sued in state court for negligently selecting an unsafe carrier, and the case can proceed on the merits rather than being dismissed early on preemption grounds. In an environment where nuclear verdicts against trucking-related defendants regularly exceed $10 million, that exposure is significant even for a company the size of C.H. Robinson.

From Reddit: an email screenshot from CHR to a carrier. I appears 3PLs are actively culling their own carrier base that doesn’t meet revised safety thresholds. A safety induced capacity crunch. pic.twitter.com/o044E1lczd

— Thomas Wasson (@ThomasWasson) May 29, 2026

Why the Ruling and the Notice Appear Connected

The C.H. Robinson carrier eligibility notice does not mention Montgomery v. Caribe. The connection, if there is one, is in the mechanism — and the mechanism is worth laying out plainly so readers can judge it for themselves.

The Supreme Court decision means a broker’s carrier selection process is now a potential source of direct legal liability. If a broker tenders a load to a carrier with poor safety scores, and that carrier is later involved in a catastrophic crash, the broker can now face a negligence claim in state court for having selected that carrier. The most important piece of evidence in that kind of case would be the carrier’s FMCSA safety data which is the same BASIC scores that C.H. Robinson’s notice references as the basis for moving carriers to non-certified status.

The sequence is what draws attention: two weeks after the Supreme Court held that brokers can be sued for selecting carriers with poor safety scores, the largest freight broker in North America began removing carriers with elevated safety scores from its board. That timing, combined with the fact that the notice’s stated criterion is FMCSA BASIC data, is why carriers and industry observers are connecting the two. It is a reasonable inference. It is not, at this point, a confirmed company rationale and this article does not present it as one.

The carrier exchanges circulating on social media this week shows how the change is landing on the ground. One carrier posted openly on X— an account whose claims have not been independently verified — that C.H. Robinson disabled access to their load board, initially unsure whether it was specific to them or “something related to the lawsuit.” In follow-up posts, the carrier said they were told by their C.H. Robinson representative that the company is referring carriers to FMCSA for safety score assessments and that many carriers are going through the same thing. The carrier’s stated frustration: that they have a clean out-of-service and violation record and still exceeded the broker’s threshold.

That detail, if accurate, points to the crux of the problem for small carriers caught in this. A carrier can have a clean out-of-service rate and pass inspections and still exceed a broker’s internal scoring threshold because the scoring model draws on the full range of FMCSA BASIC data, not out-of-service violations alone, and the threshold for what a broker will now accept appears to be tightening. The effect is less freight options for the carrier.

Why a Broker’s Threshold Would Move

Before Montgomery, a broker’s calculus on carrier safety scores balanced two things: the operational need for capacity against the relatively contained legal risk of using a carrier with mediocre scores, since preemption usually got negligent selection claims dismissed early.

After Montgomery, that balance shifts. The legal risk of using a carrier with elevated BASIC scores is no longer contained by preemption. It is a live exposure that can reach a jury. A risk-averse broker has a rational incentive to tighten its carrier acceptance threshold, reducing the population of carriers whose safety data could later be used to argue negligent selection. And after a 9-0 Supreme Court loss, the entire industry has reason to be risk-averse on this specific question.

That is the logic that connects the ruling to the kind of policy change the C.H. Robinson notice describes. Whether or not C.H. Robinson cites Montgomery as its reason, the incentive the ruling created points directly toward exactly this type of response and it points there for potentially every broker, not just one.

What This Means for Small Carriers Right Now

Regardless of C.H. Robinson’s stated rationale, the Montgomery decision changes how small carriers need to manage their FMCSA safety profile. This is no longer only about passing inspections and avoiding out-of-service orders. It is increasingly about where your BASIC scores sit relative to broker acceptance thresholds that have a clear new incentive to tighten across the industry.

Your CSA BASIC scores are now a commercial asset or a commercial liability in a way they were not three weeks ago. The seven BASIC categories: unsafe driving, hours-of-service compliance, driver fitness, controlled substances, vehicle maintenance, hazardous materials, and crash indicator all feed the scoring models brokers use to assess legal risk. A carrier who has not been actively managing those scores may have been treating them as a DOT enforcement matter only. After Montgomery, they carry commercial weight too.

The specific actions that matter now. Pull your current BASIC scores through the FMCSA portal and know exactly where you stand in each category. A score that sits below the intervention threshold for DOT purposes may still land above a broker’s commercial threshold. If you are a motor carrier and you have violations you believe were cited incorrectly, file DataQ challenges. Successfully challenged violations are removed from your record, and every violation you can legitimately remove improves your standing. If your scores are elevated, the path back is what it has always been: clean inspections accumulating over the 24-month rolling window CSA uses. What has changed is the commercial stakes attached to that cleanup.

The gap a carrier feels when a clean out-of-service record still results in lost board access is the gap between DOT compliance and commercial acceptability. For practical purposes those used to be close to the same thing. They may not be anymore.

The Bigger Picture: Capacity, Rates, and Where the Freight Goes

There is a second-order effect worth thinking through. If C.H. Robinson and other major brokers tighten carrier eligibility based on safety scores, they reduce their own available capacity at a time when the freight market has already been tightening on the supply side. A broker covering the same freight with fewer eligible carriers generally pays more to do it. The carriers who remain eligible (those with BASIC scores comfortably below the new thresholds) gain leverage. The carriers who lose eligibility lose access to a major freight source and have to rebuild it elsewhere.

This has the shape of a sorting event. It separates carriers into those whose safety profile clears the new commercial bar and those whose does not. For carriers on the right side of that line, reduced competition for broker freight is an opportunity. For carriers on the wrong side, it is a serious problem that calls for immediate attention to safety score management and likely a pivot toward direct shipper relationships and brokers with different risk tolerances while the BASIC scores are rehabilitated.

The Montgomery decision changed broker legal exposure unanimously, permanently, and effective immediately. The clearest takeaway for carriers is this: the value of a clean safety record just moved from a compliance matter toward a commercial advantage, and that shift is worth acting on now regardless of how any single broker explains its policies.

The post C.H. Robinson Is Removing Carriers Based on Safety Scores. A Supreme Court Decision Two Weeks Ago May Explain Why. appeared first on FreightWaves.