English Proficiency by the Numbers: A Look at Today’s Truck Driver Enforcement

By now you probably have read your fill of discussions about President Trump’s April 28 executive order mandating stricter enforcement of the English language proficiency (ELP) requirement for truck drivers. At FTR, we do not hold ourselves out as truck safety experts, though I certainly have spent many an hour analyzing truck safety and compliance data over some 27 years. We will leave the policy discussion to carriers, drivers, and consultants who specialize in such things.

What we can offer is some data and some thoughts on how strict enforcement of the regulation might affect trucking capacity. It’s data that’s freely available to anyone who wants it, but people who care about the topic understandably are more focused on issues of highway safety, priorities in the allocation of enforcement resources, etc.

At the outset, recognize that the regulation at issue – 49 CFR Part 391.11(b)(2) – is enforced today. It’s just not an out-of-service (OOS) violation, and it hasn’t been one for a decade.

In what at the time apparently was a somewhat contentious issue, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance in 2015 decided to remove ELP as an OOS violation on the grounds that studies by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) had failed to establish a link between the lack of language proficiency and highway safety. A little over a year later, FMCSA formally cancelled its policy of citing non-compliance with the regulation as an OOS violation, in large part because CVSA had already done so.

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What’s happening currently

Trump’s executive order calls for a reinstatement of ELP as an OOS violation, but roadside inspectors today are writing citations for failing to comply. In fact, over the two years that ended in late March, FMCSA’s violations database logs nearly 15,200 such violations.

Because FMCSA does not make public any information that identifies a specific driver – not even a meaningless code – it’s technically not possible to determine how many unique drivers received violations. However, we can approximate the number by using truck VINs as a proxy. Over the past two years, drivers associated with just over 13,000 unique VINs have drawn violations of the ELP requirement.

We can glean further insights by matching inspections to where the inspections occurred and to the license plate state of the truck inspected. The latter doesn’t necessarily tell us the domicile state of the driver, of course, but it’s close enough for broad analysis.

Some tidbits from the data range from what you would expect to some surprises. First the expected:

• The most violations by far – 16% of the total – were cited against drivers operating trucks with Texas license plates.
• California was next at 9.8% of the total.
• Those were followed by Illinois, New Jersey and Florida – all of which were closely clustered around 7.5%.

However, violations involving drivers of trucks with Mexican plates accounted for only 3.4% of the total. Mexico’s relatively low ranking might be mostly a technicality, though. If we look a little closer, carriers based in Laredo, Texas – the largest trucking port of entry by far – account for a large portion of total violations.

• Among carriers active today, drivers working for those officially based in Laredo, Texas, accounted for nearly 13% of violations.
• San Diego was a distant second at just 1.8%.
• The top seven carriers in violations were based in Laredo.

The distribution of enforcement trends is perhaps more surprising. As only one Mexican border state – Arizona – ranks in the top five states writing citations for ELP.

• Pennsylvania ranked No. 1, followed by Arizona, Tennessee, New York, and Kansas.
• Federal border inspection ranked No. 6.
• Wyoming – the nation’s least populous state – ranked No. 8.

The road ahead

We don’t know exactly how FMCSA will implement Trump’s directive, but the executive order states that a violation of the ELP requirement is to be an OOS violation. Moreover, Trump ordered the cancellation of FMCA guidance in 2016 that significantly loosened enforcement beyond formally ending ELP as an OOS violation. For example, FMCSA allowed for aids like interpreters, cue cards, smartphone apps, etc.

If we assume that all violations of 49 CFR Part 391.11(b)(2) are now to become automatic OOS violations, that arguably would have meant the idling of 13,000 drivers over the past two years – assuming that (1) none took steps to learn English well enough to pass muster and (2) drivers with violations chose to quit rather than continue to take their chances. The latter outcome seems especially dubious, but in any case, a loss of 13,000 drivers over two years might be a minor hassle but not overly burdensome on freight fluidity.

However, roadside inspectors are citing ELP far less often than they did before the policy change, presumably because of the availability of FMCSA-sanctioned alternatives like Google Translate, etc., and a general deemphasis of the requirement.

CVSA noted when it dropped ELP as an OOS violation that 83,000 ELP violations were cited in 2013, of which 3,700 were OOS violations. FTR identified nearly 100,700 ELP violations in 2014 – the final year before CVSA dropped ELP as an OOS violation. Of those violations, more than 3,900 were OOS violations.

ELP violations have plunged over the past decade. By 2018 and 2019, inspectors were citing 391.11(b)(2) only about 9,000 times a year. By 2024, that had dropped to about 7,500.

If FMCSA’s mandate now is to both make ELP a universal OOS violation and eliminate the availability of tools to make compliance easier, perhaps we will see violations swell to levels close to what we saw in the early 2010s. This is especially true if FMCSA emphasizes ELP compliance in its guidance, state enforcement funding requirements, etc. If we are then taking 80,000 to 100,000 drivers off the road, that’s more than just a hassle. We take no position on strict ELP enforcement as a matter of safety policy, but it certainly could prove to be a significant operational challenge for trucking.

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