One of the few regulatory changes in recent years that potentially could affect the supply of truck drivers occurred about a month ago when the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration required states to downgrade the commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) of drivers who are in prohibited status in the drug and alcohol clearinghouse. The compliance date for the rule, which was adopted in 2021, was November 18. States must downgrade CDLs within 60 days of being informed of drivers’ prohibited status.
As of October 1, nearly 179,000 of the 267,000-plus drivers with a violation were still barred from driving. Under the new rule, drivers with downgraded CDLs can get their driving privileges back if they complete the return-to-duty process that gets them out of prohibited status in the clearinghouse.
An obvious question is how the new regulation might affect the supply of truck drivers. Probably not very much, according to FTR’s analysis.
For starters, we can be confident that far fewer than 179,000 prohibited drivers are still active. More than 136,000 drivers have not even attempted the return-to-duty process, which involves counseling and follow-up drug tests. Motor carriers must query the clearinghouse before hiring a driver required to have a CDL, and they must conduct annual checks of their own drivers. Therefore, if all carriers are abiding by their regulatory obligations, the mandatory downgrades should be basically moot. Of course, carriers do not always follow the rules precisely.
Estimating the number
To arrive at a reasonable estimate of how many active drivers might be affected by the regulation, we compared the number of roadside violations cited for driving while in prohibited status to the total number of roadside inspections in the same period. We ignored data from 2020 and 2021 due to insufficient violations in the brand-new clearinghouse and a subdued level of roadside inspections conducted during the pandemic.
For 2022 through 2024 to date, the overall violation rate was about 0.17% – 12,800 violations out of 7.5 million inspections over three years. Applying that percentage to FTR’s estimate of the active Class 8 population yields not quite 6,400 active drivers in prohibited status. However, the violation rate declined from 0.188% in 2022 to 0.164% in 2023 to 0.152% this year. This progression makes sense because pre-employment and annual checks should be continually pushing drug-using drivers out of the industry. If we assume that the 2024 percentage is a better representation of the current situation, about 5,700 drivers in prohibited status are still active.
It’s obviously great for highway safety that CDL downgrades will take those drivers off the road, but removing up to 6,400 drivers from the market will not affect trucking capacity significantly.
Limitations in the data
There's at least one caveat to the math: Roadside inspections are not really that common. According to our analysis, only 61% of single-truck for-hire carriers that currently hold authority have been inspected at least once in the past two years. Also, very small carriers are less likely to draw a safety audit than larger operations. Fewer than 3% of active for-hire carriers with a single truck have a safety rating, which a carrier only gets following an audit. About 62% of carriers with 100 or more trucks holding for-hire authority have safety ratings. Overall, only about 8% of active for-hire carriers have safety ratings.
So, there is some risk that our estimates based on inspection data are not fully capturing drivers who might be affected by CDL downgrades. However, the actual number of prohibited drivers would have to be a multiple of FTR's estimate to affect trucking capacity meaningfully. Moreover, a substantially larger number seems unlikely given the mandates for pre-employment queries and annual checks and the fact that only 24% of the drivers in prohibited status have even begun the return-to-duty process.
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