The less-than-truckload carrier said revenue increased 4.8% to $2.4 billion in the fiscal fourth quarter ended May 31 thanks to higher fuel surcharges and weight per shipment, beating expectations. The numbers were not new because they were included in FedEx’s earnings numbers on Tuesday.

New information came in the guidance. For the remaining seven months of the year FedEx Freight (NYSE: FDXF) is expected adjusted earnings per share of $2.40 to $2.60, excluding any spin off costs. It also forecasts 4% to 6% revenue growth compared to the same period last year and an operating margin of 9% to 9.5%, up from 7.8% growth in 2025. 

Adjusted fourth-quarter operating income decreased 24% year over year to $363 million, with an operating margin of 15%. Results were impacted by separation costs, lower shipments, a gain from the sale of a terminal during the prior year and increased wage rates. Average daily shipments fell 5.9% to 86,700. Weight per shipment was 948 pounds, up 3%. Revenue per shipment of $415.22 represented an 11.5% increase.

FedEx Freight is the largest LTL company in the United States with a 17% market share, 355 service centers and about 30,000 vehicles. About two-thirds of its revenue comes from manufacturing, where growth has accelerated during the past five months. It has a dedicated sales force of more than 500 representatives.

Jefferies analyst Stephanie Moore wrote in a client note this week that FedEx Freight stands to significantly benefit from an industrial recovery because it has 30% spare capacity to soak up extra demand. 

For the full year, revenue reached $8.8 billion, a 1.1% decline. 

Earlier, FedEx Corp. announced it would reduce $4.1 billion in debt using cash provided by FedEx Freight under terms of the separation agreement.

FedEx Freight stock price dipped nearly 2% during the day and was down 1.2% in afterhours trading, with a price of $156.68 per share. It closed on June 1 at $149.53 per share.

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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Widely regarded as the premier recognition program honoring the most disruptive technology companies and forward-thinking transportation providers in North American freight, the awards celebrate those who are driving the transportation economy forward.

This year –for the first time– the awards will be celebrated and recognized at the F3: Future of Freight Festival Awards Dinner on Oct. 26, 2026. The full FreightTech 100 will be celebrated at the F3 Awards Dinner, and the top FreightTech 25 will be announced live on stage during the event in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Entry details and deadlines

Nominations can be made here starting on Monday. Companies are permitted to nominate themselves or others.

• Nomination Window: June 29 – Aug. 31, 2026 
• Nomination Fee: $595
• Promo: Applicants can use the promo code EARLYBIRD100 before Aug. 1, 2026, to receive $100 off the entry fees.

The nomination process

Nominations are open to cutting-edge startups, service providers and established industry players pushing the boundaries of transport technology. 

The evaluation process is built to elevate true, needle-moving innovation:

• Vetting: FreightWaves’ internal research team, market analysts and journalists vet the nominations to select the curated FreightTech 100 list, which will be announced on Sept. 1.
• External Judging: The top 100 list is sent to an independent, external panel of roughly 80 judges consisting of industry CEOs, academics, investors and logistics executives.
• Auditing: Judges rank their choices using a points-tally system supervised and audited independently by accounting firm Henderson, Hutcherson & McCullough (HHM) .

The final FreightTech 25 will be revealed on Oct. 26, at the F3 Awards Dinner.

The post FreightTech Awards nominations open Monday appeared first on FreightWaves.

Snap-on makes hand tools, power tools, toolboxes, and diagnostic equipment used by mechanics everywhere. Snap-on also provides repair information and systems that help shops fix vehicles faster. In 2025, the company brought in about $4.7 billion in sales. Its Repair Systems & Information Group handles the diagnostics and data side of the business. Diesel Laptops will now join that group.

Diesel Laptops, based in Irmo, South Carolina, focuses on commercial trucks and off-highway equipment. The company, founded in 2010 by Tyler Robertson, sells diagnostic tools, software, and repair information made for heavy-duty equipment. Its customers include truck repair shops, fleet operators, and businesses in mining, farming, construction, and infrastructure. Full disclaimer: before we sold my family’s heavy-duty maintenance and repair business, I was a customer too!

Mechanics use Diesel Laptops products to plug into a truck’s computer system, read trouble codes, run tests, and get step-by-step repair guides. The tools cover both on-road trucks and off-road machines. Beyond that, Diesel offers training and technical support from actual diesel technicians. The goal is to help shops diagnose problems quickly, so trucks get back on the road sooner. This was the motivation behind Diesel’s acquisition of Pretekt, now known as Watchtower, a company specializing in AI-powered predictive maintenance and remote vehicle monitoring.

Why This Deal Matters

Modern trucks and equipment have become much more complex. They use advanced computers, emissions systems, and sensors. Finding and fixing problems without the right tools and data can take hours or even days. That downtime costs fleets real money and can ripple through supply chains when loads sit waiting.

Snap-on already has strong diagnostics for cars and light trucks. Adding Diesel Laptops expands its reach into the heavy-duty market. The purchase strengthens Snap-on’s collection of real-world repair data, information gathered from actual fixes on trucks and equipment. Better data means mechanics get more accurate guidance across many makes and models. It’s all about driving mechanic efficiency. And for fleet managers and repair shops, this could mean access to more complete diagnostic solutions under one company.

In the supply chain world, reliable truck maintenance is critical. Every hour a truck sits broken is an hour a load isn’t moving. Stronger diagnostics help reduce those delays by helping identify the right part at the right time for the right price. Shops that can fix trucks faster keep fleets rolling and support smoother goods movement across the country. The $100 million price tag shows Snap-on sees real growth potential in heavy-duty repair, an industry that exceeds $100 billion in annual spend. Diesel brings specialized knowledge and customers in a market that continues to grow with more freight moving by truck and more equipment working in construction and agriculture.

This acquisition is a clear signal: the companies that succeed in vehicle repair will be the ones that combine great tools with deep repair knowledge and data. For anyone who keeps trucks and heavy equipment running, this deal is worth watching.

Matthew Leffler is a transportation attorney, adjunct professor of law at Michigan State University College of Law, and the host of the Armchair Attorney® Podcast. He can be reached at matthew@armchairattorney.com 

The post Snap-on Acquires Diesel Laptops for $100 Million: A Big Step for Heavy-Duty Truck Repair appeared first on FreightWaves.

A recent easing of some requirements by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration appears to be a sign that the rollout of Motus, the agency’s new registration portal, continues to have problems.

The specific change disclosed this week by FMCSA is that the biennial update requirement that “all entities under its jurisdiction” update their information on file with the agency every two years has been “temporarily suspended.” 

The suspension is for “entities that have not completed the required biennial update since June 1.”

The biennial update mandate, according to FMCSA, are that individuals and companies “are required to provide this update every two years even if your company has not changed its information, has ceased interstate operations since the last update, or is no longer in business and you did not notify FMCSA,” the agency says on its website in defining what that update requires.

Not to worry

Companies that have passed their due date for the biennial update since June 1 without being able to register “should not worry about inactivation resulting from Motus-related access or system issues,” FMCSA said.” Further guidance, the agency added, will be released “as recovery and stabilization efforts continue.”

The rollout of Motus that fully began May 14  had problems almost immediately. 

“I think that the good news is that FMCSA has acknowledged that ‘recovery and stabilization’ is a thing that absolutely needs to happen,” P. Sean Garney, co-director of Scopelitis Transportation Consulting, said in an email to FreightWaves about the flexibility in the FMCSA registration requirement. His firm has been working with clients who have struggled with FMCSA access via Motus since its release.

Are things better?

Garney asked a rhetorical question: Has it gotten better? 

“I’ve heard from some carriers that are gingerly moving through the process, getting hung up along the way, but passing through gates,” he said. “It’s just taking a while.”

But some of his clients, Garney said, are running into “conflicting information in various government systems that is absolutely resulting in carriers being unnecessarily unable to operate.”

FMCSA’s notice of the delay was not released as a newsroom item on the agency’s home page. It was published under its registration page. 

FMCSA administrator Derek Barrs earlier this month released a statement about the Motus rollout that focused on its goals–“an extraordinary feat of heavy lifting that involved transferring more than three decades of data across multiple legacy systems to process millions of motor carriers into one unified powerhouse platform”–while mostly downplaying the technical problems that to at least some degree appears to be mostly still in place.

Barrs referred to them as “minor technical issues.”

Online community is buzzing

A social media post on the OwnerOperators subreddit of Reddit, from a poster named DOTDefenseTech, said the latest move by FMCSA “seems like a practical move.”

“A lot of carriers depend on USDOT status for normal business: authority checks, onboarding, insurance, factoring, broker setup, customer verification, etc.” the subreddit post said. “If the system is having access or record issues, inactivating carriers during the transition could create a mess for people who are trying to stay current but cannot get the system to work right.”

Website pops up to share stories and advice

The problems with the Motus rollout has spurred the creation of a website to share issues with individuals dealing with the system, and possibly find solutions: Stuck in Motus. (Its URL, however, refers to it as “stuck with Motus.”)

As the top of the page says: “Stuck in Motus? You’re not alone.”

The page is the creation of Mathieu Vag, the founder of HaulClaim, which is a service designed to help carriers with issues relating to detention. Vag said he got the idea for Stuck in Motus from his clients who were sharing tales of woe about dealing with the new system. 

“Most of them were stuck, and they could not do anything,” Vag said in an interview with FreightWaves. “I was like, maybe if we should do something for the community where everyone can just put their problems out there and we can try to find solutions.”

Vag said interaction so far has been “pretty small,” but “the goal here is to show FMCSA that most of these guys are just stuck with no power at all.”

Nobody from FMCSA has reached out to him, Vag said.

The Stuck in Motus page has several dropdowns with advice on issues raised as a problem. Among them: “I can’t claim my company account”; “I lost or never had my USDOT pin”; “My new authority application is frozen mid-process.”

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The nation’s mail operator is nearly $31 billion in debt, but only has $8.9 billion of unrestricted cash available as it continues to grapple with declining mail volumes, rising costs and significant capital investment needs, he said in prepared remarks to the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs.

In March he warned the postal organization could be forced to shut down within 12 months, absent legislative relief.

The Postal Service now projects it will run out of cash between 2031 and the second half of 2034, once retiree health benefits premium payments come due and the health benefits fund is depleted. About 70% of the net loss comes from noncontrollable expenses.

“The bottom line is that we are out of cash. We are borrowing from our employees’ retirement funds to continue operations. I am not comfortable with that, our employees are not comfortable with that, and those of you in Congress should also not be comfortable with that,” Steiner said. “Our financial situation is dire and requires prompt consideration of legislation to ensure continuation of operations.”

As he did during an appearance before House lawmakers in March, Steiner presented a stark choice: allow the Postal Service to operate as a truly independent agency, free of government-imposed mandates or reimburse the USPS for having to provide universal service. Subsidizing universal mail delivery would allow the Postal Service to grow and help support a $2 trillion mailing industry that relies on the Postal Service, he added. 

Harsh realities

Mail volume has dropped by more than half since its peak in 2000, while the number of addresses requiring service grows by 1 million annually and the workforce is about the same size as in the 1970s. At the current rate of 78 cents for a First-Class stamp, the lost volume represents $81 billion in potential revenue.

“This mismatch between our universal service mission, volume trends, and revenue limitations is why the business model and liquidity crisis facing the Postal Service requires prompt action from public policy makers to ensure the survival of a key part of our nation’s critical infrastructure,” the Postmaster General said.

The Postal Service Reform Act in 2022 increased transparency around postal delivery performance, ended overly burdensome retiree healthcare prefunding requirements, integrated Postal Service retirees health care with Medicare, and codified six-day delivery service, but did not address all non-cash balance sheet obligations. 

Over the past five fiscal years the Postal Service has posted $9.7 billion in controllable losses, which critics say proves that the Delivering for America restructuring started under predecessor Louis DeJoy in 2021 is not working. Steiner argued that Congress has often tried to undermine modernization efforts, such as moving to a hub-and-spoke model — which enables handling packages on a system designed for mail, consolidating regional distribution centers, lowering service standards, and raising prices, but those efficiency measures aren’t enough to achieve financial stability.  

“It is past time to have a public policy reckoning of what is an affordable set of universal service mandates for the Postal Service to either afford on its own, get reimbursed for, or shed,” Steiner said.

Other proposals to put the Postal Service on a stronger financial footing include curtailing the days of delivery service each week, closing thousands of money-losing post offices, substantially increasing the price of a First-Class stamp, investing its pension funds, and revising calculation for its Civil Service Retirement System obligation. The most immediate benefit would come from raising the Postal Service’s borrowing authority from $15 billion to $30 billion or $40 billion, which would give management breathing room to address other problems, Steiner said.

He blasted the Postal Regulatory Commission for regulating the Postal Service like a monopoly when it faces electronic or private delivery competition for every mail category. The PRC, for example, recently limited price increases to once a year, which would annually cost the Postal Service $700 million in lost revenue. Federal restrictions on managing workers compensation claims and shipping alcohol like competitors also cause financial harm, the postal chief said.

Since March, the Postal Service has imposed an 8% parcel surcharge to cover the rising cost of transportation, retained Amazon as a customer at about 80% of its previous volume, signed a major contract to provide DHL eCommerce with last-mile parcel delivery, and proposed raising First-Class stamp prices to 82 cents.

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations said it received a report of an incident southeast of Dahit, Oman. 

“A cargo vessel has been hit on the starboard side by an unknown projectile, causing damage to the bridge,” the security monitor said. “Master has reported no casualties and no environmental impact.”

The vessel was the Singapore-flagged Ever Lovely, an 8,500-TEU ship operating in the fleet of Taiwan-based Evergreen Marine, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The Gulf of Oman runs up to the southern edge of the Strait of Hormuz, the maritime chokepoint controlled by Iran. Representatives from the U.S. and Iran have been negotiating a permanent end to the conflict that has shaken global shipping.

Iran’s Navy said it would enforce restrictions against ships not using routes authorized by Tehran. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) had been coordinating a corridor with Oman, the latter said in a statement on social media.

After the incident, the IMO said it was suspending until further notice its support for the vessel movement process.

The latest reporting says U.S.-Iran talks are still moving, but with mixed signals: Trump and U.S. officials are describing the negotiations as constructive, while Iranian officials are publicly contradicting some U.S. claims and stressing caution.

On the Strait of Hormuz, the immediate issue is whether any deal will include limits on Iran’s ability to interfere with shipping or levy tolls, and U.S. officials have been talking about keeping the waterway open as part of the broader diplomatic package.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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The ILWU strike at C&H Sugar in Crockett led by Warehouse Local 6  reportedly is over healthcare, retiree benefits, sick leave, overtime rules, and union protections as part of a new three-year contract. 

The strike by unionized warehouse employees at the massive Bay Area complex began around mid-June, with about 90–100 workers involved. The historic plant, which famously figured in the “Sugar Wars” of the 1930s, receives rail service from Union Pacific and generates 25,000 truckloads of sugar per year.

American Sugar Refining, parent of C&H, says it offered a 20% wage increase while the union says the company’s concessions are unacceptable. The union has not disclosed its core demands.

Workers say the company proposed cutting five of 10 annual sick days, ending retiree medical benefits, and changing overtime rules so premium pay would start only after 40 hours in a week, according to local reports. The union’s position is that wages were negotiable but core rights and benefits were not.

It’s the first C&H Sugar strike by warehouse workers in decades. The last comparable shutdown at the site was in 2003, when workers walked out in solidarity with sugar employees rather than over their own contract. One account also says some striking workers complained about the use of replacement labor and that the company was trying to get employees to cross the picket line.

Subscribe to FreightWaves’ Rail e-newsletter and get the latest insights on rail freight right in your inbox.

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The post California: First ILWU strike against sugar giant in decades appeared first on FreightWaves.

That reality was on display this month when a Philadelphia man was sentenced to 94 months in federal prison for his role in an organized cargo theft ring responsible for stealing more than $1.5 million in freight from interstate shipments moving through the Philadelphia region. The case offers a rare look inside how a modern cargo theft crew operated and how investigators ultimately dismantled it.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Salahudin Reddy pleaded guilty to conspiracy, theft from interstate shipments, possession of stolen goods from interstate shipments, theft of government property and possession of stolen government property. The charges stemmed from a seven-month cargo theft conspiracy that operated between January and July 2023.

One crew. More than a dozen cargo thefts.

Federal prosecutors described Reddy as an active participant in an organized theft crew that repeatedly targeted tractor-trailers parked throughout the Philadelphia area. Court records show the group waited until trailers were unattended or drivers were asleep before using bolt cutters and other tools to break into the trailers and remove the freight inside. The stolen cargo was then sold through contacts around Philadelphia.

The government estimates the conspiracy stole more than $1.5 million worth of freight from over 10 victims. During a span of just a few weeks in April 2023, investigators say the crew stole more than $1 million worth of cargo, including frozen snow crab legs, Samsung televisions and more than $230,000 in newly minted U.S. dimes.

The sentencing memorandum notes that these were not isolated crimes. Prosecutors argued the crew committed more than a dozen cargo thefts over several months, repeatedly identifying vulnerable shipments before coordinating teams of vehicles and individuals to unload freight before law enforcement could respond.

The dime theft that drew national attention

Among the most unusual thefts described in court filings involved a shipment of newly minted U.S. dimes leaving the Philadelphia Mint.

According to prosecutors, a tractor-trailer carrying more than $750,000 worth of 2023 dimes was parked overnight after departing the Mint for Florida. Investigators say members of the theft crew broke into the trailer during the night and transferred more than $230,000 worth of coins into waiting vehicles using large trash cans. Thousands of dimes were left scattered across the parking lot after the theft.

The theft quickly became national news, but investigators were already gathering evidence that would eventually tie members of the crew to the crime.

Cell phones, group chats and GPS told the story

The federal investigation relied heavily on digital evidence rather than eyewitness testimony alone.

Court documents describe investigators using cell-site location data, phone records, text messages, surveillance video and GPS information to reconstruct the conspiracy. Following the dime theft, one co-conspirator reportedly sent a message to a months-long group chat stating, “We made it!” alongside a screenshot of social media coverage of the theft. Another image recovered by investigators allegedly showed one of the conspirators lying in the bed of a pickup truck filled with stolen dimes.

Investigators later recovered newly minted dimes from a box truck allegedly purchased for use by the theft crew. Bank surveillance also captured one of the conspirators depositing thousands of stolen dimes after opening a new account, according to court filings.

The same investigative techniques connected the crew to additional thefts involving seafood and electronics. Prosecutors cited text messages discussing prices, coordinating vehicles, requesting bolt cutters, sharing GPS locations and arranging buyers for stolen cargo shortly after each theft.

Entire truckloads disappeared overnight

One of the largest thefts occurred on April 6, 2023, when prosecutors say the crew stole approximately 34,500 pounds of frozen snow crab legs from a trailer parked at a seafood wholesaler while the driver slept inside the tractor.

According to court records, the driver awoke after feeling movement inside the trailer and called police, reporting that as many as 15 individuals in six or seven vehicles were removing the cargo. By the time officers arrived, the entire shipment had been taken. Investigators later recovered a rented Chevrolet Suburban containing stolen crab legs, bolt cutters and a rewards card bearing Reddy’s name.

Only days later, prosecutors say the crew stole approximately 103 Samsung 75-inch televisions from another parked tractor-trailer before attempting to sell them through contacts identified in text message conversations.

Physical theft remains a growing concern

The timing of the sentencing comes as the FBI warns that cargo theft continues to evolve across the transportation industry. In a recent public advisory, FBI Philadelphia warned carriers, brokers and shippers that organized cargo theft groups are increasingly combining traditional trailer burglaries with fraud schemes involving fictitious pickups, fraudulent carrier identities and other forms of supply chain deception.

The Philadelphia case illustrates that both forms of cargo theft continue to exist simultaneously. While identity-based fraud often dominates industry headlines, organized crews continue searching for physically vulnerable freight parked at truck stops, warehouses and staging locations.

The common denominator remains opportunity. Whether criminals exploit a stolen carrier identity or a parked trailer, investigators say they are looking for weaknesses in the supply chain that allow freight to disappear before anyone realizes it is gone.

A reminder for the transportation industry

In its sentencing memorandum, the government argued that Reddy’s conduct demonstrated the seriousness of organized cargo theft and the need for sentences that deter similar crimes. Prosecutors described the theft ring as creating fear for truck drivers while repeatedly enriching itself through stolen freight. They also noted that Reddy fled from law enforcement on multiple occasions before his eventual arrest by the FBI.

The investigation was conducted by the FBI and the Philadelphia Police Department. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Alexander Bowerman and Christopher Diviny prosecuted the case.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office referred FreightWaves to the FBI’s recent cargo theft advisory for additional context regarding current cargo theft trends. FreightWaves has also reached out to FBI Philadelphia for additional comment and will update this story if more information becomes available.

Click here for more articles on cargo theft and freight fraud by Phillip Brink.

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The price of trust: How a cargo theft changed one shipper – FreightWaves

July 4 holiday period exposes supply chain vulnerabilities – FreightWaves

The post Federal case reveals how a cargo theft ring operated in plain sight appeared first on FreightWaves.

The Teamsters have won a key victory over Amazon at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) before an administrative law judge, but the next step in the battle over what it takes to organize workers may be more challenging.
Michael P. Silverstein, a California-based administrative law judge for the NLRB, this week cited the full board’s Cemex precedent in ordering Amazon to recognize a group of workers at the online retailer’s DCK6 warehouse in San Francisco.
Those workers in October 2024 had submitted authorization cards at the warehouse representing a majority of workers dubbed Tier 1 associates who declared they wished to affiliate with the Teamsters.
When the cards were presented to Adam Carr, described in the ALJ’s report as the site manager at DCK6 on October 2, 2024, union representatives “attempted to hand Carr a letter, but he refused to accept it. Other associates spoke to Carr about why they were organizing and after the speeches ended, (a Teamsters representative) left the letter at Carr’s feet,” the ALJ decision said.
Following that, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) did not recognize the union. Nor did it file, as the Cemex precedent said would be required, an RM-petition, which demands a secret vote election.
The Cemex decision in 2023 was a full NLRB decision during the Biden presidency. As ALJ Silverstein said in summing up that case, “the Board created a new pathway for labor organizations to obtain recognition without filing a representation petition.”
If a majority of the workers in a unit signs authorization cards, that unit “can present the employer with a demand for recognition,” according to ALJ Silverstein’s recap.

Following the law
The ALJ did not sound overly enthusiastic in giving his reasoning why he was ruling for the Teamsters.
“This is the first case litigated after Cemex alleging the commission of an unfair labor practice simply because the employer did not file an RM-petition and declined to recognize the union upon the presentation of a demand for recognition,” he wrote. “Because I am compelled to follow the Board’s guidance…I find that Amazon has violated..the (NLRB) Act as alleged in the complaint.”

In a prepared statement, the Teamsters celebrated the ruling. “The Teamsters applaud this decision and will do everything in our power to ensure that Amazon complies with it,” Randy Korgan, director of the union’s Amazon division said. “Once again, an NLRB judge has rightfully ruled against the most abusive and corrupt employer in the world.”

The Teamsters statement also cited an NLRB decision from April that requires Amazon to begin negotiating with the Teamsters at its facility on Staten Island, New York. That location is the only Amazon facility where the rank-and-file have won a traditional election, as opposed to the submission of authorization cards, a process also known as card check. (The union that was victorious was a local grass roots effort that later became part of the Teamsters).

Union representatives have said there has been no progress on negotiations at the Staten Island facility despite the victorious election. 

Amazon will appeal

Sam Stephenson, a spokesman for Amazon, said the company would appeal the decision “and we’re confident that a court will overrule it.”

“Despite their claims to the contrary, the Teamsters don’t represent any Amazon employees or partners – at this site or at any Amazon facility – and the legal process in this case is ongoing,” Stephenson said. 

Amazon has consistently denied the legitimacy of the vote at the Staten Island facility, hence the apparent disagreement between it and the Teamsters over the status of those workers, who did vote to be represented by the grass roots union that ultimately aligned with the Teamsters. 

A labor attorney writing about the ALJ decision saw the next step in the process as being more significant than what occurred this week. Her views were not positive for the union.

Full agency awaits

In a blog for her law firm Duane Morris, associate Elizabeth Mincer said the next step in the just-decided case is the full NLRB, assuming an Amazon appeal of the ALJ decision. 

And there, Mincer wrote, the Teamsters are going to be in front of a Republican majority that will control a full five seats on the board.

There have been vacancies on the NLRB, but President Trump recently nominated Republican James Macy and renominated Democrat David Prouty to bring the board up to four out of five membes.  

If both are confirmed, which Mincer said is likely, “the Board would have a three-member Republican majority with the votes needed to overturn Biden-era precedents.”

The Cemex decision overturned an earlier precedent known as Linden Lumber. Mincer said if Cemex is overturned, “the most likely outcome is a return to the Linden Lumber standard, under which employers could reject card-based demands for recognition and insist that unions seek a secret-ballot election.” 

If Cemex is overturned, Mincer also added that “employers would no longer face a two-week deadline to file an RM petition after receiving a recognition demand.”

Earlier setbacks for Cemex

The Cemex precedent already has taken a hit in federal court. In March, the Sixth Circuit ruled the NLRB had overstepped its authority in issuing its Cemex decision and rules that went along with it. 

Early in the second Trump term, the NLRB’s then acting general counsel William Cowen rescinded the agency’s memo on the Cemex decision. 

But the impact of those guidelines were not mentioned by ALJ Silverstein in his decision on the Amazon case. His decision suggests the Cowen memo on Cemex has had no impact on the agency. 

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What began nine years ago as a dinner gathering of roughly 20 people at a restaurant in Laredo, Texas, has grown into the largest U.S.-to-Mexico logistics event in the country. On June 9, 2026, the 9th Annual Modernization of Cross-Border Trade (MCBT) convened at the Laredo Country Club, drawing representatives from more than 500 logistics companies eager to navigate a rapidly shifting cross-border landscape.

“The event started with only 20 people,” said Mark Vickers, founder of Borderless Coverage and Executive Vice President and Head of International Logistics at Reliance Partners, which hosts the event. “Now this is the largest U.S. to Mexico logistics event in the U.S.”

That growth mirrors the trajectory of Borderless Coverage itself. Vickers developed the company as an entrepreneurial venture. It was the first program to offer per-load, per-project, per-client cargo insurance coverage for shipments into Mexico. 

Reliance Partners, the largest privately held transportation and logistics insurance agency in the country, acquired Borderless Coverage in 2021. The MCBT event grew right alongside this acquisition, evolving from an insurance-focused gathering into a premier forum for shippers, freight brokers, carriers, customs professionals, and technology providers operating across both sides of the border.

Where Tequila Met Trucking

One of the most distinctive threads of this year’s event was the involvement of the tequila industry. The sponsorship story started with a feature article Vickers wrote for Tequila Aficionado exploring the risks of moving tequila between the U.S. and Mexico. The piece opened a conversation that led somewhere unexpected.

“I talked to the owners of Tequila Aficionado and asked if their network was interested in meeting logistics people,” Vickers said. The answer was yes. Top tequila brands signed on as sponsors, and the conference featured a guided tequila tasting for the assembled logistics professionals. It was a hands-on demonstration of the kind of supply chain relationships the event was designed to foster.

Tequila is the top import from Mexico into the United States, and the risks that come with moving that product across the border (cargo theft, insufficient insurance, unvetted carriers) are exactly what the MCBT event was built to address.

The 2026 sponsor lineup spanned the full breadth of the cross-border supply chain, from Descartes Systems Group and Evans Transportation to Green Corridors, Kuehne+Nagel, Averitt, and Cargado, which hosted a happy hour following the main conference sessions. It’s a far cry from the early years of the event.

“We didn’t even take sponsors the first five years,” Vickers said. “But now it’s sponsored by companies from Canada to Mexico.”

Carrier Vetting at the Forefront

The most urgent topic dominating this year’s conversations was one that has become impossible to ignore: how U.S. companies can confidently vet Mexican carriers in a legal environment that now carries criminal stakes.

The Trump administration’s designation of several Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations has introduced a sobering liability calculation for U.S. freight brokers. If a company tenders a shipment to a Mexican carrier with cartel ties, even unknowingly, the owner of that company could potentially face up to 20 years in federal prison for aiding and abetting a foreign terrorist organization. Combined with the recent Montgomery v. Caribe Transport ruling, which reinforced broker liability standards for carrier selection, the imperative to vet Mexican carriers has never been more acute.

“These developments have really put carrier vetting in Mexico at the forefront of the Mexican supply chain,” Vickers said. “This is going to involve a rigorous process that Mexican carriers are not accustomed to. U.S. brokers are making Mexican carriers sign agreements and there are requirements for cargo insurance in Mexico.”

For many U.S. companies, the question is no longer whether to vet their Mexican carrier partners, it’s how. Vickers’ carrier vetting platform Confianza, developed in partnership with a Monterrey-based law firm and leading Mexican transportation tech firm, offers a solution: pre-vetted Mexican carriers that U.S. companies can work with confidently, knowing their partners have cleared a rigorous compliance and identity verification process.

USMCA 2.0 and the Green Corridors Vision

The regulatory backdrop for this year’s event was particularly charged. July 1, 2026, marks the sixth anniversary of the USMCA signing, and the upcoming USMCA 2.0 revision is set to reshape the terms of North American trade. Expert panelists helped attendees understand what to expect from the renegotiated agreement and how to position their operations accordingly.

Perhaps the most forward-looking discussion of the event centered on the Green Corridors initiative, a privately funded infrastructure project that could fundamentally transform the Laredo-Monterrey corridor. The proposed 165-mile elevated guideway would link the two cities through an automated network of AI-enabled freight shuttles operating within a closed-loop system, with integrated customs facilities built directly into secure terminals on both ends. The result will be cargo that bypasses international boundary delays entirely, with capacity to handle up to 10,000 trailers per day in each direction.

The panel, moderated by Troy Ryley of Echo Global Logistics, featured insights from Lorne Alcock of Green Corridors, Marco Antonio González Valdez of the State of Nuevo León, Jesus Ojeda of Redwood Logistics, and José Minarro of Sunset Transportation. Together, the panelists detailed how the corridor could dramatically reduce emissions and wait times while alleviating one of the most acute bottlenecks in the global supply chain.

A Room Built on Handshakes

Beyond the panels and presentations, the MCBT event’s biggest value lies in what happens between sessions: the matchmaking that takes place when U.S. shippers and brokers sit across from Mexican carriers and have candid conversations.

“There was a ton of shaking hands between Mexican carriers and U.S. brokers and carriers,” Vickers said. “Historically, there has not been a lot of sharing of info across the border.”

That’s precisely the gap the event was built to close. With nearshoring accelerating, tariff pressures reshaping global supply chains, and the U.S.-Mexico trade corridor growing more strategically important by the year, the kind of relationship-building that happens in Laredo is now a necessity.

“This is where everyone learns what world-class risk management looks like between the U.S. and Mexico in 2026,” Vickers said.

If you’re looking to get ahead of the curve, Reliance Partners and Borderless Coverage offer cargo insurance, carrier vetting, and cross-border risk management consulting tailored to the realities of the Mexico trade lane. Learn more at borderlesscoverage.com or reliancepartners.com.

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Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Armstrong’s executive leadership team, led by CEO Cameron Ramsdell, will remain in place and retain significant ownership of the company, while the new partnership provides capital to accelerate both organic growth and strategic acquisitions.

“We selected Quad-C because of their deep experience partnering with growth-oriented management teams in the transportation and logistics sector,” Ramsdell said in a news release. 

Founded in 2006, Armstrong operates a non-asset-based third-party logistics platform through a nationwide network of independent freight agents and direct brokers. 

Armstrong  arranges truckload, less-than-truckload, heavy-haul, flatbed, temperature-controlled and cross-border freight throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico. 

The Quad-C investment comes as Armstrong celebrates its 20th year in business after a period of rapid expansion.

According to a recent company post on LinkedIn, Armstrong grew to approximately $440 million in revenue during its first 13 years before nearly doubling to more than $850 million in 2023. The company said it is now on pace to surpass $2 billion in annual revenue, crediting investments in technology, expansion into new markets and growth of its agent network.

Tom Hickey, senior partner at Quad-C, said Armstrong has built an impressive record of growth despite difficult freight market conditions.

“Armstrong’s remarkable long-term track record across different freight environments speaks to the quality of the leadership team and organization,” Hickey said. 

Another area of expansion For Armstrong has been cross-border logistics.

In a LinkedIn post Tuesday, Armstrong said capacity between the U.S. and Mexico remains available but warned that market conditions vary significantly by lane as carriers become more selective and trade uncertainty creates volatility. The company said it provides bilingual coordination, CTPAT-certified carriers, customs documentation support, secure storage and cargo insurance for shippers moving freight across the border.

The Armstrong investment expands Quad-C’s transportation and logistics portfolio, which has included previous investments in MNX Global Logistics, AIT Worldwide Logistics and Worldwide Express.

Founded in 1989 and headquartered in Charlottesville, Virginia, Quad-C is a middle market private equity firm focused on investing in established services and industrial companies. The company has invested $4.9 billion of capital in 91 platform companies and over 418 add-on acquisitions.

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The Port of Long Beach handled 842,030 twenty foot equivalent units (TEUs) in May, an increase of 31.7% from May 2025, and the third-busiest May on record.

Long Beach, which with the Port of Los Angeles comprises the busiest U.S. container gateway, saw imports soar 40% to 418,851 TEUs, while exports were better by  32.9% at 109,168 TEUs. Empty containers, often an indicator of future import traffic, rose 21.8% to 314,012 TEUs.

Long Beach has processed 4,050,247 TEUs through the first five months of 2026, up 0.2% y/y, closely tracking record volume in 2025.

“These numbers reflect the strength and adaptability of the supply chain,” Chief Executive Noel Hacegaba said in a media briefing. “Shippers are responding to the higher cost of doing business by moving cargo earlier.”

Hacegaba said rising fuel costs, tariff uncertainty and geopolitical concerns are all contributing to expectations for an earlier peak shipping season, with higher-than-normal cargo volumes anticipated in July and August.

Retailers and other shippers are also frontloading to try and stay ahead of manufacturers’ cost increases set to take effect in July. Carriers have been adjusting capacity, pushing trans-Pacific rates significantly higher over the past several weeks while making available booking space more scarce for shippers.

Hacegaba said the potential long-term effects of tariffs, energy availability and a peace agreement between the United States and Iran that led to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz shadow business plans.

“While these issues may seem very different – security, energy markets and trade policy – they all point to the same challenge: uncertainty,” Hacegaba said. “Supply chains perform best when businesses can plan with confidence. Whether we’re talking about fuel costs, geopolitical risks, or tariff policy, predictability remains one of the most important drivers of supply chain efficiency and economic growth.”

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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Allentown, PA–A little more than a year ago, Mack Trucks commenced a drive into a market where its widely-known brand had not made much of an impact: over the road trucking.

At an April 2025 gala attended by a crowd numbered in the hundreds, shortly after an event with the trucking press, Mack returned to its Brooklyn roots to reveal the Pioneer, its new entry designed to snag more market share in the OTR segment. (Mack was founded in Brooklyn by the Mack Brothers in the early 20th century).

Fourteen months later, Mack last week brought a group of trucking journalists to its research center here, near its key North American production plant, to talk about how the growth strategy is progressing, including a discussion about some changes in its product offerings.

The Mack offerings in the over the road space are the Pioneer, which was the focus of the 2025 launch in Brooklyn, and the Anthem, whose existence dates back several years but which underwent an overhaul soon after the launch of the Pioneer.

Full order book for ’26

While production numbers weren’t disclosed, the most positive indicator is that Mack’s order book for both the Pioneer and Anthem is sold out through the end of the year. 

The presentations and interactive demonstrations in Allentown–this correspondent got to drive a Pioneer on the company’s test track and managed not to crash it–stressed many of the differences between the latest updates in the Pioneer and the Anthem. (A subsequent ride on the highway had a Mack employee behind the wheel).

Pioneer’s standard features in its updated version features a 76-inch sleeper, compared to a 64-inch sleeper available in the Anthem and the earlier version of the Pioneer. 

The Pioneer also has what the company calls a battery driven integrated parking cooler, an Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) that can provide air conditioning to the driver using the sleeper cab.

BBC differences are significant

The Bumper-to-Back-of-Cab (BBC) on the Pioneer is 125.5 inches, compared to a 113.5 BBC for the Anthem. That length on the Anthem was reduced in its latest iteration from 117 inches. 

“”We previously had just the Anthem that was really our do-it-all highway tractor,” Blake Routh, Mack Trucks senior highway product manager, said in a presentation. “It was used in long haul, it was used in regional haul. When we launched the Pioneer we really moved from one truck with just the Anthem to now two trucks with the Pioneer and the new Anthem.”

Routh said the two trucks are the same in many ways “at the surface. But they’re designed to really maximize different things.”

That BBC is the key difference, Routh said. “The Pioneer is designed with that longer nose, and it’s really intended to be the more over the road tractor,” he added. 

Routh said the reduction in the Anthem’s BBC enables the Anthem to be better suited to some markets, like a denser urban landscape. “It can really operate anywhere, but in those tighter areas, the Anthem is going to really excel with that shorter nose,” he said.  

The powertrain on both trucks is identical. But Routh said the aerodynamics of the Pioneer will give it slightly better fuel efficiency than the Anthem.

Comfort a selling point

Routh, along with David Galbraith, Mack vice president of global brand and marketing and the various Mack employees who led the test track and highway rides, made clear that one marketing push for the Pioneer and Anthem will be that, as Routh said, “both trucks are extremely comfortable.”

There are four main selling points for the two trucks, Routh said, and the first one he cited was comfort. The other three: safety, efficiency and uptime. “These are the things that we talk to our customers day in and day out,” he said.

One of the main comfort points touted by Routh as well as the drivers escorting the track and highway rides was the proximity of dashboard controls to the driver. 

Dashboard controls are “very easy to reach,” Routh said. “We want the driver to be comfortable and able to reach everything. If they’re looking for buttons, they’re not going to be looking at the road. We want them to be able to easily get to it.”

“This truck is really designed and focused around what the driver wants,” Routh added. With the additional nine inches in the Pioneer cab, Routh said it “starts narrower in the front, and then it expands out, which allows us to deliver a wider cab and a wider sleeper area to the customer.”

The comfort aspect of the updated Pioneer discussed by Mack officials also features the company’s proprietary APU, the “parking cooler,” that allows power to the sleeper cab for such services as air conditioning without idling the diesel engine. 

Routh said the APU is installed at the Mack factory, and is designed by the company as well. A third-party APU means truck owners, faced with problems with the unit, will need to send their truck to an outside company, he added. 

With the proprietary Mack APU, Routh said, ‘you only talk to one person. You don’t have to go to another person, you go to the dealer. This allows us to seamlessly integrate.”

The full order book for the rest of the year is a positive start. Where does it go from here?

Smaller fleet success, bigger fleets eyed

Routh said historically Mack “has done a really good job in the smaller fleet market, and I’d say that trend is continuing.”

But he added that “we’ve had some really good discussions and wins with larger fleets as well. So I’d say we’re doing quite well.”

Galbraith said that marketing of the new vehicles is proceeding on several fronts, “but we realize that our most powerful advocate is word of mouth ambassadorship.”

“So we get people to put their butts in the seats, and once they realize they like it, they sell it themselves. The trucks are amazing. It’s just a matter of proving the value.”

Even with the positive signals coming out of a full order book, Routh conceded that the marketing push for the Pioneer and the Anthem is “still fairly early.”

“We’re still learning how the market’s going to go,” he said. “Our customers are still learning, because this is new territory for them.”

But there’s enough of a history in just over a year that, as Routh said, “the second set of orders have changed even from the first set. And the third set is probably going to change a little bit too, and then eventually we’ll probably get a little bit of understanding of where each one’s going to go.”

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Samsara (NYSE: IOT) moved Wednesday to close that gap with a pair of product launches at its Beyond 2026 customer conference in Las Vegas. The company introduced the Samsara Tracking Label, a single-use, paper-thin Bluetooth label delivering near-real-time shipment visibility.  It also announced Agent Studio, a no-code tool that lets operations teams build and deploy AI workflows without IT support.

“A Label You Can Slap on a Box and Walk Away”

The Tracking Label is adhesive-backed, flexible and paper-thin, with a 45-day battery life and no lithium or hazardous materials. It ships cleared for air, ground and rail and can be discarded without special handling once a shipment arrives.

What drives it is the Samsara Network: millions of connected devices spanning trucks, trailers, buses, construction equipment and warehouse scanners covering 99% of major U.S. roads and tens of thousands of worksites. The network continuously listens for Tracking Labels, detecting location in near-real time without requiring carrier involvement.

David Gal, Samsara’s vice president of connected equipment, put the customer need plainly during the keynote.

“Our customers have been using asset tags to track critical shipments, and that works, but it’s not purpose-built for cargo,” Gal said. “What they’ve been asking for is a label they can slap on a box and walk away. That’s exactly what the Tracking Label is.”

The gap the label fills is notable. Traditional carrier scans deliver status updates at pickup and delivery, with little visibility in between, even on less-than-truckload (LTL) and full truckload moves carrying thousands of dollars in cargo.

“In LTL and truckload shipping, you typically only hear about your shipment twice — when it’s picked up and when it’s delivered,” said Dave Tu, president of DCL Logistics, a third-party logistics provider and early Tracking Label adopter. “Samsara’s Tracking Label changes that. It gives us a level of visibility that just didn’t exist before, and when you’re moving high-value cargo, that’s a big deal. It’s like watching your Uber driver on the way to pick you up — you can see every move, every turn, right up until it pulls up to the door.”

DCL now manages fulfillment and carrier handoff for leading brands across consumer electronics, consumer packaged goods, enterprise hardware and GPUs.

Where the Samsara Tracking Label Shifts the Market

Bluetooth-based asset tracking has historically struggled with fragmented infrastructure. Zoe Roth, senior research analyst at 451 Research from S&P Global, identified that as the defining constraint.

“Our data shows that organizations rely heavily on GPS and cellular technologies — adopted by over half the market — to track non-powered assets, often absorbing higher hardware costs to guarantee visibility,” Roth said. “Meanwhile, lower-cost alternatives like RFID and BLE currently sit at around 39% adoption, historically constrained by fragmented infrastructure, according to our 451 Research Supply Chain Digital Transformation Survey 2026. Providing a persistent, wide-area network for Bluetooth assets could dramatically shift this landscape, enabling scale where infrastructure has previously been the bottleneck.”

The Shipment Center, a dashboard managing Tracking Label-equipped freight, pairs location data with AI-driven exception management. A shipping manager can ask which packages face delay risk from weather and focus on flagged shipments rather than monitoring every move manually. The Samsara Shipment App activates labels with a single barcode scan and connects directly to existing TMS or ERP systems, with no system replacement required.

Agent Studio Automates the Work Nobody Wants to Do

The second launch, Agent Studio, is available in open beta as a no-code workshop where operations teams can build and deploy AI agents from templates or from scratch.

Johan Land, Samsara’s chief product officer, tied it directly to the company’s data advantage.

“Samsara has spent the last 10 years deeply embedded in the world’s most complex physical operations, giving us unprecedented visibility into what’s happening on the ground,” Land said. “In 2025 alone, we captured 25 trillion data points across the Samsara Network across vehicles, equipment, worksites, and operations. Now, customers can act on this insight by leveraging Samsara’s platform to fully automate workflows without extensive IT expertise.”

The studio ships with more than 15 prebuilt templates across safety and maintenance. Early deployments include a driver assistance agent at a major food distributor that fields parking, weigh station and policy questions, saving 30 minutes of communication time per call, and a daily fleet briefing tool at a food bank that tracks vehicle inspection compliance.

Grand Isle Shipyard put the financial case directly.

“We were spending more than six figures a year on reporting and data compilation — work that’s now fully automated,” said Derek Champagne, Grand Isle Shipyard’s vice president of corporate security, asset management and housing. “Automation allowed us to reallocate both resources and talent toward higher-value initiatives. The real benefit isn’t just efficiency; it’s the ability to focus our people on solving bigger problems, driving innovation, and creating value that simply wasn’t possible before.”

Chris Hammock, director of transportation for Graceland Portable Buildings, zeroed in on what operations teams have been waiting for: the ability to fix workflows without waiting on IT.

“Agent Studio gives us the ability to look at our own daily processes and build to fix the gaps,” Hammock said. “We can make small changes ourselves, which may save us hours, instead of entering the IT project queue.”

Tu, drawing on months of shipping high-value freight with the Tracking Label already in deployment, saw the broader trajectory clearly.

“I think this technology is revolutionary,” Tu said. “Right now, it’s predicated on reactive communication, and it’s basically switched that. So now you have proactive communication and instant visibility. The industry’s hungry for this, and it’s gonna get even better.”

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The $25 million Infrastructure for Rebuilding America (INFRA) grant will be matched by $25 million from NorthPoint Development, the port’s partner in its public-private partnership, to advance environmental review, permitting, and preliminary engineering activities.

The Pacific Coast Intermodal Port will create a new West Coast option for container traffic, moving boxes between the port and a connection via the port’s Coos Bay Rail Line with Union Pacific (NYSE: UNP) and the national rail network in Eugene, Ore. The terminal has a projected capacity of 2 million twenty foot equivalent units (TEUs).

“The market need for additional freight capacity and supply chain resilience hasn’t changed. If anything, it’s become more apparent,” Chad Meyer, president of NorthPoint Development, said in a release. “This agreement helps us advance the ball and positions us to meet that demand.”

The INFRA grant is just one of several recent funding awards for the estimated $2.3 billion project. The Oregon Legislature has provided $100 million; other federal money includes a $29.75 Consolidated Rail Infrastructure and Safety Improvements grant, and $11.25 million from the U.S. Maritime Administration’s Port Infrastructure Development Program.

More on the Coos Bay project is available here.

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The freight transportation giant said it took a $23 million charge during its fiscal year fourth quarter, ended May 31, to write down the value of 10 aircraft that were retired, including five large MD-11 freighters.

FedEx (NYSE: FDX) also retired four Boeing 757-200 narrowbody freighters and one Airbus A300-600. The company took  delivery of seven 767-300 production freighters from Boeing during the fiscal year, for a net decline of three aircraft from 2025, according to financial documents.

Over the last four years, FedEx has removed 34 cargo jets from the fleet, which represents an  8% reduction versus fiscal year 2022, as part of normal fleet modernization and a broader effort to eliminate excess ground and air capacity for better efficiency. There are 383 mainline aircraft in FedEx’s fleet, compared to 389 in fiscal year 2024.

The Federal Aviation Administration in early May cleared the way for MD-11 operators to resume commercial service after Boeing developed a new part to address a design flaw that can allow fatigue cracks to spread in the plane’s engine pylon. A UPS MD-11 freighter crashed during takeoff in November when the left engine separated from the wing. FedEx is removing engine pylons from grounded aircraft around the world and shipping them to maintenance hubs in Indianapolis and Memphis, Tennessee, where technicians can replace a critical bearing.

FedEx began operating two MD-11s on domestic routes on May 10. CEO Raj Subramaniam told analysts on an earnings call that four MD-11s have been fixed and are back in service now. The remaining 25 aircraft will be ready to support peak shipping season during the fourth quarter.

Airline officials have repeatedly said since the November accident that UPS had 29 active MD-11 jets, including four spares used when other units are unable to operate or during periods of high demand. But FedEx records show the company carried 34 MD-11s on its books until the previous quarter. 

UPS opted to permanently retire its entire fleet of MD-11s following the disaster at its megahub in Louisville, Kentucky. Western Global Airlines, the only other MD-11 operator in the United States, has reactivated two MD-11s, according to aviation tracking site Flightradar24. The planes are flying under military contracts with the Pentagon to bases in Europe.

FedEx postponed the full retirement of the MD-11 fleet from 2028 until 2032 because it wanted more widebody capacity to meet rising demand as it made a strategic shift to capture more international non-parcel freight from logistics providers. Despite its age, lower maintenance reliability and high fuel burn compared to modern twin-engine planes, the tri-engine freighter remains useful because of its long range capability and high cargo capacity.  

Since 2024, FedEx has prioritized capturing a greater slice of the $80 billion-to-$90 billion deferred air cargo market, especially the premium segment. The integrated courier and logistics company reorganized its air network into express parcel and deferred freight segments to maximize aircraft density and sorting efficiency on the ground. A portion of its airline now operates an international daytime schedule to carry heavy freight that doesn’t require maximum speed, allowing for the integration of air and road networks in a truck-fly-truck delivery model that is more efficient to operate than moving all goods by air. 

Management has described this deferred air network as an extension of its European and U.S. less-than-truckload networks, designed to attract high-yield freight, such as pharmaceuticals, perishables, electronics and automotive components that is more profitable per pound than heavier, general consignments.  

Chief Commercial Officer Brie Carere said FedEx continues to capture market share in the international air freight sector, with average daily pounds up 12% year over year. 

FedEx continues to receive new aircraft under existing orders with Boeing, but the pace of additions has slowed in recent years in line with a multi-year campaign to streamline multiple air and ground networks amid slower growth in parcel volumes. FedEx spent $3.8 billion on capital expenditures in fiscal 2026. Infrastructure as a percentage of revenue is 4%, the lowest level in many years.

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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The glitch has potentially triggered safety audits for carriers that have been operating for years or even decades.

Ben Greenberg, president and CEO of the North Carolina Trucking Association, alerted carriers to the issue Tuesday in a message posted on LinkedIn. According to Greenberg, the apparent problem is affecting fleets that unexpectedly received notifications for FMCSA new entrant safety audits despite having long operating histories.

“We are actively communicating with FMCSA and the North Carolina State Highway Patrol (NCSHP) on this issue and expect a resolution soon,” Greenberg wrote. He added that the issue does not appear to be limited to North Carolina.

In a follow-up comment, Greenberg said that “at least 400 NC carriers were added into the queue overnight” and warned carriers not to ignore the notices because operating authority could potentially be affected.

SafeSpect is FMCSA’s inspection and compliance platform used to collect data related to commercial motor vehicles, motor carriers and drivers. The agency describes the system as a tool designed to support enforcement personnel and help ensure compliance with federal motor carrier safety regulations.

The exact cause of the apparent misclassification remains unclear. Industry officials have suggested that a recent SafeSpect update may have caused some established carriers to be erroneously categorized as new entrants, prompting audit notifications that would normally be reserved for newly authorized motor carriers.

FreightWaves has reached out to FMCSA and the North Carolina Trucking Association seeking additional details.

This is a developing story. FreightWaves will update this report as additional information becomes available.

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The deals involve Wisconsin-based AmeriLux Transportation & Logistics, Montreal-based ANDY Corp., and Portland, Oregon-based Imperative Logistics Group, each targeting different segments of the supply chain ecosystem. 

The transactions underscore how logistics companies are using acquisitions to add specialized capabilities and broaden customer offerings rather than relying solely on organic growth.

AmeriLux acquires Dedicated Systems

AmeriLux Transportation & Logistics announced it has acquired Green Bay, Wisconsin-based Dedicated Systems Inc., a family-owned carrier specializing in nationwide transportation and over-dimensional freight hauling.

Founded in 1991, Dedicated Systems offers flatbed transportation and oversized freight movements. 

According to FMCSA records, Dedicated Systems operates 68 power units and employs 70 drivers. The carrier reported more than 6 million miles traveled in 2025.

AmeriLux Vice President Marc Leisgang said the transaction positions the company for its next stage of growth and includes plans to relocate transportation offices to Dedicated Systems’ former headquarters in Green Bay.

AmeriLux also announced a strategic partnership with Airoldi Brothers, Wisconsin’s largest independent truck leasing company. Under the agreement, Airoldi Brothers will relocate maintenance operations to the former Dedicated Repair facility, creating additional fleet support capabilities.

De Pere, Wisconsin-based AmeriLux International started AmeriLux Transportation in 2012, a trucking company with its own drivers and equipment. Today, the AmeriLux family of companies are a full-service freight and third-party logistics provider.

ANDY expands transportation network

In Canada, ANDY Corp. announced the acquisition of the majority of the assets of Transport Express Frontières, a Quebec-based carrier serving customers across North America.

As part of the transaction, drivers supporting Transport Express Frontières’ operations will join ANDY, allowing customers to maintain continuity while gaining access to the company’s broader transportation network and technology platform.

The acquisition aligns with ANDY’s strategy of expanding transportation, warehousing and integrated supply chain services through targeted investments. Company officials said the addition enhances dependable capacity and dedicated transportation offerings for customers.

FMCSA records show Frontiers Express Ltd., operating as Express Frontiere Ltee, maintains eight power units and two drivers focused on cross-border freight transportation between Canada and the U.S.

ANDY President and CEO Andreea Crisan said the acquisition supports the company’s focus on sustainable growth and long-term customer partnerships. 

Montreal-based ANDY Corp. is a privately held supply chain company with operations in transportation, logistics, warehousing and fleet management.

Imperative Logistics strengthens customs brokerage business

Imperative Logistics Group took a different approach to expansion, acquiring the operations of customs brokerage and international trade services firm Jose D. Gonzalez, CHB.

The acquisition significantly expands Imperative’s customs brokerage, trade compliance and cross-border logistics capabilities at a time when importers and exporters face increasing regulatory complexity and shifting trade policies.

Founded in 1994, Laredo, Texas-based Jose D. Gonzalez, CHB has spent more than three decades helping customers navigate customs clearance, import-export regulations and international trade compliance requirements.

A key component of the deal is the addition of Jose D. ”JD” Gonzalez, who currently serves as chairman of the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America. Gonzalez will join Imperative Logistics as vice president of national accounts and help drive growth across the company’s international and cross-border services.

Imperative CEO Dante Fornari said the acquisition enhances the company’s ability to help customers manage increasingly complex global trade environments through expanded customs expertise and regulatory support.

Portland, Oregon-based Imperative Logistics Group specializes in global forwarding, U.S.-Mexico cross-border solutions, mission critical domestic, expedite services, and fine arts.

Key acquisition highlights

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“From the outset of our announcement to merge strengths with Union Pacific Railroad (NYSE: UNP), we have been clear: Norfolk Southern (NYSE: NSC) is not singularly focused on closing a transaction,” George wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday.

“There is no trade-off between evaluating long-term opportunities to strengthen the freight rail network and executing at a high level for customers today. Responsible leadership requires both,” George wrote. “We operate NS as a standalone railroad that competes and wins in today’s market, because that’s what our customers and employees expect and deserve. We also have to think about what will unlock their ability to tap a more competitive rail ecosystem.”

George admits that NS service is currently falling short of expectations as the railroad struggles with a bout of crew shortages and rising volume. Terminal dwell has risen and train speeds have fallen since a bout of harsh weather in February and a March 7 derailment that shut the railroad’s main line across Pennsylvania for 48 hours.

Although operations improved after the traditional dip in volume around Memorial Day, the railroad gave up those gains over the past two weeks,according to its latest service data. While intermodal on-time performance remains above 95%, roughly one third of merchandise shipments arrived more than 24 hours later than their original estimates this past week.

“Recently, we have acknowledged where performance has not met our customers’ expectations, nor our own, quite frankly. Some of this is due to external pressures like weather and macro conditions,” George wrote. “We have taken targeted actions to improve our execution, and to strengthen the resilience of our network. The foundation is solid, and these actions will build on it. Our operations team, led by new COO Brian Barr and made up of long-tenured, dedicated railroaders who have delivered historic service levels before, is focused on stabilizing performance and driving measurable improvement over time.”

Barr replaced John Orr, who resigned as executive vice president and COO May 31.

Norfolk Southern remains committed to improving service consistency, network fluidity, and communication with customers, George wrote.

It’s a misconception, the CEO says, that looking long-term is a distraction for day-to-day operations.

“The opposite is true,” he wrote. “A strong railroad today is the foundation for any future success, and at the same time, we are looking ahead to ensure we continue to create value and strengthen the network over the long term. We’re seeing those priorities go hand in hand.”

George contends that the UP-NS merger will break a structural barrier to rail volume growth: The inability to provide coast-to-coast service.

“By directly connecting Eastern and Western railroads without the need to interchange traffic with another carrier, our merged railroad will strengthen the U.S. supply chain, support American manufacturing, create workforce opportunities (including growing vital union jobs), improve transit times, enhance national security, and deliver broad public benefits including lowering costs for shippers,” George wrote.

The other Class I railroads and some shipper associations have said the merger is not necessary and will reduce rail competition and increase shipping costs while posing the risk of integration-related service problems.

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Rail, ocean access backs new Americold cold chain facility at eastern Canada port

CSX officially opens $495 Baltimore intermodal rail tunnel project

BNSF wins local approval for new $4B California rail intermodal project 

Intermodal pulls away from carload rail freight

Rate, service issues flagged by ag retailers in Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern rail merger

The post Norfolk Southern CEO says railroad must focus on today and tomorrow appeared first on FreightWaves.

Association of American Railroads’ data showed total carloads at 230,959 units, better by 2.8%, while intermodal volume of 289,447 containers and trailers outdistanced year-ago traffic by 10.9%.

Intermodal’s improvement has come as strengthening truck rates push domestic conversions to less expensive rail. At the same time, an early start to the peak shipping season has international volumes surging through U.S. ports. 

Six of the 10 carload commodity groups were up y/y. Grain topped winners, up 21.7%; while metallic ores and metals used in steelmaking increased by 19.2%. 

U.S. grain exports for the week ending June 11 totaled 2.807 million metric tons inspected and/or weighed for export, up from 2.760 million the prior week and 2.340 million in the same week in 2026.

Weaker results came in coal, seasonally down 8.3%. Motor vehicles and parts were off 0.5%.

Cumulative U.S. volume through the first 23 weeks of 2026 was 5,215,944 carloads, up 3.2%, and 6,403,177 intermodal units, up 2.7%, from a year ago. Total combined traffic was 11,619,121 carloads and intermodal units, better by 2.9%.

Weekly North American volume on nine reporting U.S., Canadian and Mexican railroads was 337,700 carloads, an increase of 1.7% from the same week a year ago. A total of 379,536 intermodal units was ahead  9.3%. Total combined traffic improved by 5.6% to 717,236 carloads and intermodal units. Volume for the first 23 weeks of this year rose 2.5% to 15,993,851 carloads and intermodal units from 2025.

Canadian railroads handled 93,827 carloads for the week, an increase of 2.8%, along with 75,465 intermodal units, up 1.1% y/y. For the first 23 weeks of 2026, volume of 3,788,314 carloads, containers and trailers was narrowly ahead by 0.6%.

Weekly carloads fell 20.3% on Mexican railroads to 12,914 carloads, but increased 27.3% to 14,624 intermodal units. Cumulative volume year-to-date was 586,416 carloads and intermodal containers and trailers, up 8.2% y/y.

Subscribe to FreightWaves’ Rail e-newsletter and get the latest insights on rail freight right in your inbox.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

More news:

Rail, ocean access backs new Americold cold chain facility at eastern Canada port

CSX officially opens $495 Baltimore intermodal rail tunnel project

BNSF wins local approval for new $4B California rail intermodal project 

Intermodal pulls away from carload rail freight

The post Intermodal rail higher as shippers switch from trucks appeared first on FreightWaves.

In an interview with FreightWaves, Ryan Martin, president of distribution and fulfillment at ITS Logistics, discussed inventories, trailer strategy and shipper budgets amid tightening capacity.

“Pain is ahead on the transportation side,” Martin said. “We’ve been seeing the signs building for months. Shippers don’t typically believe it until they start to feel the pain.”

That pain is already showing up in the data. Driver exits, carrier closures, increased regulatory scrutiny on non-domiciled operators and surging fuel costs are stacking up. For large retailers and brands still budgeting for a flat year in transportation spend, this could be their reckoning.

The Great Inventory Cleanup

Understanding the current situation requires looking back a few years. The post-pandemic inventory overhang is finally clearing, but not without consequences. Martin has watched brands wrestle with a harsh new math problem: products that once cost a dollar now run $1.52, turning excess inventory into a cash-flow drain.

“Every customer is pushing for better inventory turns due to the cost of inventory increasing, whether that be through tariffs, transportation rates, etc.,” said Martin “Customers need to manage their turns much closer from a cash flow standpoint and be a lot more on point with what they buy.”

The math is unforgiving. During the pandemic, companies could not manufacture fast enough. Everyone bought massive amounts of product. It arrived in waves and kept selling — until it didn’t. By 2022 and 2023, inventories had ballooned, warehouse space overflowed, and brands sat on mountains of merchandise they could not move without taking losses.

“Retailers don’t want to heavily discount items (upwards of 50%-75% plus) just to move the inventory as it sits on the balance sheet as a cash equivalent,” continued Martin. “So they will sit on it, moth ball it for some time and then it typically only moves when a new buyer or General Merchandise Manager comes in and gets the grace to liquidate that destressed inventory, since they didn’t purchase it in the first place, they don’t own the loss when its sold.”

The result has been aggressive SKU rationalization. One brand ITS works with is cutting 50% of its product catalog after finally calculating true carrying costs. Martin used a lean-manufacturing metaphor to describe what is happening across the industry.

“The water level lowers. You can see the rocks in the stream,” he said. “Right now, we’ve been so focused on that, that’s why warehouse capacity increased over the past couple of years.”

The cleanup has exposed a pattern Martin saw repeatedly during his 11 years on the retail side. When division managers and merchandise buyers miss their buys, they do not get a free pass to write off the inventory. The reckoning comes when leadership changes.

“Whatever they buy is all theirs,” Martin said. “And it’s their responsibility to sell it. That’s why the General Merchandise Managers for these retailers have some of the biggest jobs in the sector — they control millions, if not billions, of dollars in spend.”

The winners in this environment are wholesalers such as TJX Companies, Ross and Dollar General, which buy distressed inventory when brands finally pull the trigger on markdowns.

“Those that go out and buy this distressed inventory, they do very well in these markets,” Martin said.

The Cheerios vs. Gas Theory

Consumer behavior remains the biggest wildcard. Martin has developed a theory about what truly drives purchasing decisions, and it has little to do with grocery prices.

“No one could ever tell you what the box of Cheerios cost yesterday at the grocery store was even though it went up 50%,” he said. “It doesn’t resonate. When you go to the pump, that resonates with everyone.”

It is simple psychology, and it is powerful. Fuel serves as a universal economic anchor. Everyone fills up on a consistent basis, and the price stares back within minutes. When that number climbs, anxiety follows — even among consumers who do not technically need to worry.

“It’s a few purchases that everyone knows. Everyone knows the baseline,” Martin said. “And when it increases like it is today, you start getting a little nervous even if you don’t need to.”

When fuel hit $7 or $8 per gallon in certain regions, e-commerce purchases dropped noticeably, especially for higher-end items. Mother’s Day provided a brief pop, but the underlying anxiety persists.

“We definitely saw a dip, and I’ve known enough people and talked to enough people that there was a dip across e-com,” Martin said. “There was definitely a dip especially for higher-end purchases just because of the impact of fuel.”

The numbers create a troubling paradox: U.S. revolving credit card debt has reached record levels above $1.2 trillion while consumer sentiment remains weak. Martin finds himself in unfamiliar territory.

“We’re in this weird scenario that we haven’t been in, at least in my lifetime, because usually consumer sentiment typically follows GDP growth,” he said. “But I think most people have gotten used to this spending on credit cards.”

If the fuel situation does not improve, Martin warned, it could have a detrimental impact on the overall economy and consumer purchasing.

Trailers as Table Stakes

While shippers scramble with inventory, ITS Logistics is doubling down on its drop-trailer fleet. Adam Angle, who leads trailer operations and equipment at ITS, said the company doubled its fleet from 2024 to 2025 and projects reaching about 13,000 ITS trailers by year-end — potentially more after synergies from Echo Global Logistics’ acquisition of ITS, which closed in March.

“It’s definitely at times table stakes to have assets in these conversations,” Angle said of drop-trailer capabilities. The strategy goes beyond simply having equipment. In addition to its decaled trailers, the company maintains access to roughly 300,000 trailers through partner carriers — flexibility that customers increasingly demand.

“DropFleet isn’t just about ITS owning trailers. It’s about building a universal, flexible trailer ecosystem that adapts to how each customer operates—without sacrificing execution or network efficiency,” Angle said. “A big driver of that evolution is the universal pool concept, which allows us to flex both the number and frequency of destinations we serve through one integrated solution.”

The technology inside those trailers has evolved far beyond basic GPS. Internal cameras now show shippers when loads are only 70% full, opening conversations about efficiency. Redundant concealed tracking provides cargo security and a way to recover assets if theft occurs.

“When we’re able to harvest that data, extract it and go back to the customer with, ‘Hey, your volume’s only 70%’ — that’s when it starts to open their eyes that that kind of technology is available and can strategically help their supply chain get more efficient,” Angle said.

The fleet expansion comes as ITS pushes into cross-border operations. The company already moves freight in and out of Canada, and Mexico service is expanding through the Echo integration.

The Market Coiled for a Snap

Load tender volumes mirror 2019 levels, yet capacity continues to leave the market. Both Martin and Angle see a coiled spring ready to release.

“We continue to see supply leaving the market for a multitude of reasons,” Angle said. “That’s the reality and I that’s what the pain is right now, and I think it will continue to tighten. You’re seeing all-time highs in spot market rates, and that’s without any meaningful pick-up in demand yet.”

The dynamic creates a precarious situation. If demand suddenly spikes — driven by stabilizing fuel prices and still-low inventory levels — the market could shift violently.

“If gas prices get back in line, inventories being low, this could be a real interesting peak season,” Angle said.

“As power capacity tightens, the ability to aggregate trailing capacity becomes a real competitive advantage,” Angle continued. “DropFleet lets us capture and reuse trailing capacity across thousands of carriers instead of relying on a few. That’s how you protect service when disruption hits or markets flip.”

For shippers who budgeted flat, the next rate-guide cycle could bring what Martin calls cascading rate-guide failures. Three years of soft markets have bred complacency.

“It’s been three years of down. I’ve been a shipper, so I know that they’re not blind to the market shifting,” Martin said. “They know it’s coming, but they’re trying to push it off as long as they can.”

The consequences could be severe. Shippers have likely already built budgets, bonus structures and internal approvals around a flat transportation spend assumption.

“They’re going to get challenged from a budgetary perspective this year if rates continue to increase,” Martin said. “It’s already happening, but it might just be the tip of the iceberg.”

The post ITS Logistics warns shippers budgeting flat face capacity reckoning appeared first on FreightWaves.

The courier giant on Tuesday pointed to strong growth in yields and volumes across its domestic and international parcel and freight products as a positive verdict on the strategy to focus on growing market share in premium markets such as automotive, healthcare, aerospace, data centers and specialized B2C. FedEx (NYSE: FDX) has largely abandoned local, last-mile parcel delivery for e-commerce sellers because the low margins can’t offset the high cost of operating a global multi-modal network.

Revenue increased 13% to $25 billion and adjusted earnings per share of $6.31 was up 4% year over year, but the company’s operating margin contracted to 8.4% from 9.1% as it coped with volatile tariff changes from the Trump administration, the grounding of the MD-11 freighter fleet, uncertainty from the Iran war and rising transportation and labor costs. FedEx and its pilots this month finalized a new contract that increases pay by 40% over the four-year term. 

The results were the first issued since FedEx spun off its freight trucking business on June 1.  FedEx Freight reports results on Thursday. FedEx’s fiscal year 2026 ended on May 31, but the company switched to reporting on a standard calendar year format on June 1, making upcoming year-over-year comparisons more difficult. The company expects to meet its target of more than $1 billion in savings this year because of the network streamlining.

FedEx grew full-year revenue by 9% to $94.7 billion and adjusted operating income by 17%. The 7.7% adjusted operating margin was the highest margin rate in four years. 

Domestic and international package volumes in the quarter grew 13% versus the prior year period. Package yield was up 11%. In the past two years, FedEx has targeted heavy freight shipments to better utilize its airline capacity. The new focus led to a 12% increase in the average daily pounds for international export freight compared to the same quarter last year. Management highlighted continued strong momentum in international air freight, despite elevated fuel surcharges. Pass through of high fuel costs has not dampened demand so far, the company said.

FedEx’s consolidation of express and ground networks into an integrated operation continues to make progress. By the end of June, about 45% of FedEx’s eligible U.S. and Canadian average daily volume will flow through 490 reorganized facilities, with optimized volumes rising to 65% by peak season in the fourth quarter, CEO Raj Subramaniam said during a presentation to analysts.

In Europe, FedEx achieved its twelfth consecutive quarter of revenue gains, which the company attributed to better service levels. Subramaniam said Europe represents the largest opportunity for profit improvement in the cross-border international business. A 9% fall in international domestic volume was largely attributed to a strategic decision in Europe to improve margins by focusing on higher yielding cross-border volume. The company recently announced a $54 million investment to expand a less-than-truckload terminal in Duiven, the Netherlands, to support growth in the premium parcel and freight market, and better align with the reimagined deferred air freight network. FedEx is targeting high-yield air freight, such as pharmaceuticals, perishables, electronics and automotive components that is more profitable per pound than heavier, general consignments.

FedEx is beginning to recoup duties ordered returned by the Supreme Court because the emergency justification used by the Trump administration was deemed unconstitutional. Chief Commercial Officer Brie Carere said FedEx will start passing on refunds to customers in August.

On a calendar-year basis, FedEx said it expects revenue to grow 11% in 2026 with guidance for about $17.50 per adjusted diluted share at the midpoint implying y/y growth of 16%.

FedEx’s stock price was down 3.5% in after hours trading. 

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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The post FedEx boost revenue behind premium parcel, freight volumes appeared first on FreightWaves.

Developed in collaboration with Dubai port terminal operator DP World and Canadian Pacific Kansas City (NYSE: CP), Americold (NYSE: COLD) said the facility is the first of its kind with global reach to combine the Atlanta company’s cold storage operations, DP World’s maritime logistics capabilities, and CPKC’s rail network in a single location. The partnership, it said, creates a more direct and reliable pathway for moving perishable goods between inland production regions and international markets.

“This facility leverages our collaboration with leading global trade and transportation partners, creating a uniquely integrated solution to move temperature-sensitive products between inland production regions and international markets more efficiently and reliably,” said Rob Chambers, chief executive at Americold, in a release. “It is another example of how we are evolving our network to better serve our customers through differentiated solutions that open new growth opportunities for the company.”

The facility is designed to support flows between central and eastern Canada and Europe, South America, and the Asia-Pacific region. Americold says that it is the only temperature-controlled storage solution in eastern Canada directly connected to a port without drayage, reducing cost and transport time between vessel and warehouse.

“The grand opening of this new cold storage facility at Port Saint John marks an important milestone in CPKC’s growing collaboration with Americold,” said Keith Creel, CPKC President and CEO, in the release. “By combining this state-of-the-art facility with CPKC’s three-nation rail service, we are creating a new temperature-controlled supply chain that connects Atlantic Canada to key markets across Canada and throughout North America. Working with Americold and J.D. Irving’s NBM Railways, CPKC has helped deliver a secure, seamless and integrated solution that is truly unique and one our competitors simply cannot replicate.”

The hub at Port Saint has capacity of approximately 22,000 pallet positions and is designed to support high-throughput import and export volumes with more efficient handling across transportation modes.

“The operational launch of the Americold facility at Port Saint John reflects the progress we are making in aligning terminal operations, inland rail connectivity, and temperature-controlled storage,” said Doug Smith, CEO of DP World in Canada. “By coordinating these capabilities, we enable customers to move perishable goods through the port with greater consistency and efficiency as they connect to global markets.”

German container line Hapag-Lloyd makes a weekly Saint John call on its Mediterranean service. Hapag’s Gemini Cooperation with Maersk (OTC: AMKBY) calls on the trans-Atlantic AL1 service as the  last North American port before sailing to Southampton. Gemini’s AL3 service was also announced for Saint John beginning in January.

“Americold is a tremendous addition to Port Saint John and to the broader trade ecosystem taking shape at our gateway,” said Craig Bell Estabrooks, President and CEO of Port Saint John. “Their import-export hub on the waterfront strengthens our role in enabling trade diversification and driving economic prosperity in New Brunswick and beyond.”

Subscribe to FreightWaves’ Rail e-newsletter and get the latest insights on rail freight right in your inbox.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

War’s over, but ocean rates face raft of challenges 

CSX officially opens $495 Baltimore intermodal rail tunnel project

Are you overpaying? Why shippers should revisit emergency fuel surcharges now

After $450M project, Port of Virginia goes deep to raise the bar among East Coast container gateways

Cargo thieves are following the AI boom

The post Rail, ocean access backs new Americold cold chain facility at eastern Canada port appeared first on FreightWaves.

When rates start firming up in the freight cycle, capacity thins out and shippers call begging for trucks. The first instinct is often to add more assets. 

But as the trucking industry has painfully learned over successive cycles, scaling a business doesn’t always make it stronger – it also multiplies its vulnerabilities. To scale successfully, carriers must transition from transactional, day-to-day survival to structured, strategic management.

This is where the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program can lend both capital and the know-how necessary for smart company scaling.

Designed to help passionate entrepreneurs take their enterprises to the next level, the fully funded, 12-week intensive business education program can be a resource for small-scale trucking companies to grow with confidence.

Moving beyond the bottleneck

Many small carrier fleets never actually hit a physical limit of trucks or drivers; instead, they hit an owner capacity bottleneck.

When a fleet runs on one person’s memory rather than structured systems, adding even one or two more trucks can break the entire operation. Dispatching, maintenance, compliance, billing and driver relationships cannot all live in the owner’s head indefinitely.

The Goldman Sachs curriculum –designed in partnership with Babson College– directly addresses this operational bottleneck. Through the Vision & Strategy and Operations & Technology modules, business owners learn how to replace themselves in day-to-day tactical roles and design repeatable processes.

By building solid administrative infrastructure, owners free up the cognitive capacity needed to lead a larger organization. 

Bridging the capital gap

Growth requires capital. Whether it is purchasing new equipment, hiring drivers or carrying receivables for 30 to 60 days, expansion severely drains cash reserves. 

To keep companies from running out of runway, the 10,000 Small Businesses program provides direct pathways to capital through its network of local and national lending partners.

Participants gain access to lenders who review applications on an ongoing basis. With an average loan size of $52,000, these partnerships help small business owners secure the financing necessary to fuel their customized growth plans. 

Program eligibility

The 10,000 Small Businesses program is 100% funded by the Goldman Sachs Foundation, meaning there is zero tuition cost for accepted participants. However, it requires a serious time commitment of approximately 10 hours per week of intensive instruction and networking over a 12-week period.

To qualify, a trucking company must meet the following baseline eligibility criteria:

1. Ownership: The applicant must be an owner or co-owner of the business.
2. Operational History: The business must have been operating for at least two years.
3. Revenue: The company must have generated $75,000 or more in revenue in one of the past two fiscal years.
4. Staffing: The business must have at least two employees, which can include the owner themselves.

Carriers can apply for either local, in-person cohorts at community colleges across 19 regional locations, or apply to the online-based National Cohort if they do not reside near a physical location.

Real results

Goldman Sachs’ education and capital network can help small carriers plan for growth without relying solely on market luck.

According to data published by Goldman Sachs, 66% of alumni report increased revenues six months after graduation, and 44% have created new jobs. By the 30-month mark, the revenue growth rate climbs to 74% and job creation reaches 53%.

The post How carriers can scale with Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses program appeared first on FreightWaves.

Shortly afterward, the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office announced charges against two individuals, Mustafa Salik and Erfan Kamal, each accused of receiving stolen property connected to the shipment. Prosecutors said the stolen property was valued at approximately $18,000 and confirmed that it had been recovered. Under Missouri law, the charge is a Class D felony carrying a sentence of one to seven years in prison upon conviction. A Jackson County judge set bond for each defendant at $75,000. The defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty or they enter a guilty plea.

Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson said her office “will not tolerate any criminal activity that targets World Cup visitors, including the international teams that have traveled here to compete.” Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas praised law enforcement for coordinating an investigation across several states, recovering the stolen goods and ensuring the accused would face prosecution. I contacted the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office seeking additional details about the case. Jazzlyn Johnson, director of communications for the office, said the charging documents and probable cause statement are available publicly through the prosecutor’s website but declined to discuss anything outside of the public court documents because the case remains ongoing.

The speed of the investigation is encouraging. However, the recovery of the property does not change the more important question: How did a shipment supporting one of the world’s most recognizable sports teams become vulnerable in the first place? At first glance, the losses appear relatively minor. Roughly $18,000 worth of equipment and memorabilia is a fraction of the value that moves through the transportation industry every day. However, focusing only on the dollar amount misses the bigger issue. The real story is that a shipment associated with one of the most visible sporting events in the world experienced a breakdown in security somewhere along its journey.

A secure shipment should stay secure

This was not an ordinary shipment. It supported one of the world’s most recognizable sports teams during the largest sporting event on the planet. The shipment was time-sensitive, highly visible and part of a carefully coordinated logistics operation. Security was almost certainly a priority from the moment the cargo left Florida until it arrived in Kansas City. If there was ever a shipment that should have remained secure from origin to destination, this was it.

Yet the investigation also highlights a familiar problem in transportation. Once cargo changes hands multiple times, establishing exactly where a breakdown occurred can become difficult. Freight routinely moves through multiple facilities, changes custody several times and crosses state lines before reaching its final destination. Every handoff creates an opportunity for something to go wrong. When companies cannot establish a clear chain of custody or verify who had access to a shipment at every stage, investigations become more difficult and accountability becomes harder to establish.

The England theft is a reminder that even organizations with extensive resources are not immune to these challenges. Visibility alone does not create security. Strong processes, documented custody and consistent verification do. The same principles that protect pharmaceuticals, electronics and consumer goods also apply to sporting events, regardless of how recognizable the brand or organization may be.

Small breaches create bigger risks

That is why the dollar amount is almost irrelevant. An $18,000 theft is frustrating, but it is survivable. A breakdown in security is something else entirely. Security failures expose weaknesses in processes, controls and accountability. Once criminals identify those weaknesses, they often return. The freight industry has seen this pattern repeatedly. Cargo thieves rarely begin with their biggest target. They look for weaknesses in processes, controls and verification procedures. Every successful theft teaches criminals where the gaps are and how much resistance they can expect the next time.

Imagine if the shipment had contained pharmaceuticals, semiconductors or medical supplies instead of soccer gear. The consequences of the same security breakdown could have been far more severe. The England shipment happened to contain replaceable items. The next shipment targeted by criminals may not be so forgiving. That is why transportation companies cannot afford to dismiss smaller incidents simply because the financial losses appear manageable.

The lesson for freight

This is especially important as North America hosts the 2026 World Cup. The tournament will generate an enormous amount of freight activity. Merchandise, food, beverages, promotional materials and team equipment will move constantly between venues and host cities. That increase in activity will create more opportunities for criminals to exploit mistakes.

Organized theft groups do not care who owns the cargo. They care about access, opportunity and weak controls. If criminals are willing to target a shipment connected to the most watched sporting event in the world, they are certainly willing to target ordinary freight moving quietly through the supply chain. As freight volumes increase, so does the importance of verifying identities, documenting custody and creating accountability at every stage of a shipment.

The good news is that the property was recovered and charges were filed. The bad news is that the security failure occurred in the first place. Transportation companies should not look at this story and think, “It was only $18,000.” They should ask themselves a different question: If criminals were willing to target one of the most recognizable shipments in the world, what makes them hesitate to target yours?

Because in freight, the value of a theft is not always measured by what was taken. Sometimes it is measured by what the theft revealed. Even small breaches can expose very large vulnerabilities.

Click here for more articles on cargo theft and freight fraud by Phillip Brink.

July 4 holiday period exposes supply chain vulnerabilities – FreightWaves

Why the safest freight brokerages are usually the most boring – FreightWaves

Cargo thieves are following the AI boom – FreightWaves

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A pair of Republican members of the House of Representatives have introduced legislation in the Congress aimed at what they say is “a dangerous loophole” in federal regulations that can lead to ELD records being altered from outside the borders of the U.S.. 

Reps. Greg Steube of Florida and Dave Taylor of Ohio, the latter who is the chairman of the Congressional Trucking Caucus and a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, introduced the Guarding Hours-of-Service Oversight and Stopping Tampering by Remote Unofficial Carrier Keeper. It has the acronym of GHOSTRUCK Act.

The act, they said in a prepared release, is targeted at closing “a dangerous loophole that allows foreign-based dispatchers to manipulate Electronic Logging Device (ELD) records used to track commercial truck drivers’ hours of service.”

Driving the bill, according to the statement, is that current law “does not clearly prohibit foreign-based personnel from making edits or annotations to ELD records used to track commercial drivers’ Hours of Service (HOS).”

The statement links to the CBS News news story and transcript about “chameleon carriers,” particularly those based outside the U.S., which has received a significant amount of discussion since it aired on 60 Minutes in Aprll. 

The 60 Minutes broadcast featured a discussion between driver Daniel Sanchez and a dispatcher in Serbia regarding HOS.

“After they’d already logged 11 hours behind the wheel – the legal limit – managers back in Serbia would illegally reset federally mandated time clocks to give drivers a fresh set of hours, as heard in this call,” the CBS report said, as it played a conversation between Sanchez and his dispatcher.

It quoted the dispatcher speaking to Sanchez as saying “we can fix your clock.”

“By the push of a button, I guess, somehow somewhere they have control of the app where they can just reset your time,” Sanchez was quoted as saying. “Just make it go away.”

“While edits may be necessary to account for circumstances such as rest breaks or refueling stops, concerns have grown over foreign-based dispatchers altering records from overseas while remaining outside the reach of U.S. accountability measures,” the two members of Congress said in their prepared statement.

The two Congress members have lined up a large number of trucking-related associations expressing their support for the legislation. 

Alex Rosen, the senior vice president of legislative affairs with the American Trucking Associations, said “roadway safety depends on consistent compliance with hours-of-service regulations, and preserving the integrity of electronic logging devices is central to that mission. Tampering with electronic logs is a growing problem that undermines enforcement, rewards bad actors, and puts the motoring public at risk.”

And Todd Spencer, the president and CEO of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, said the group is “proud to support Representative Steube and Taylor’s GHOSTRUCK Act, which would prevent foreign nationals in places like Eastern Europe and Asia from altering the ELD records of American truckers. Importantly, the bill ensures that a driver has final approval for any edits suggested by their motor carrier.”

The post Legislation targets ‘loophole’ on altering HOS records appeared first on FreightWaves.

Federal government monitoring of the Teamsters, with a history that dates back to the final years of the Reagan administration, is coming to an end.

The union announced last week that both the Teamsters and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York–a position generally seen as one of the most powerful U.S. Attorney’s offices in the country–had “jointly filed a motion to amend the Final Order and the Consent Decree, ending federal government monitorship of the union.”

The Revised Final Order submitted by the two sides requires judicial approval.

A history from 1988

The first steps taken toward federal monitoring of the union go back to 1988. But as the Teamsters’ announcement notes, the decree itself goes back to 1989, with the goal to “eliminate organized crime influence with the union and ensure fair, democratic, member-driven elections.”

Sean O’Brien was elected president of the Teamsters in 2021, and re-elected last week at the company’s convention in Las Vegas, an event that takes place every five years. 

“Since the election of Sean M. O’Brien as Teamsters General President in 2021, the Teamsters have built a new system of rigorous checks and balances in which every member complaint is investigated, and when appropriate, referred to legal authorities,” the union’s statement on the joint request said.

Allegations of organized crime influence

The joint memo filed with the federal district court for the Southern District of New York, which had supervised the monitoring and is now backing its cessation, spells out what led the Justice Department in 1988 to seek action against the Teamsters.

“Among other things, the Government’s complaint alleged that the La Cosa Nostra defendants, aided by IBT defendants, had seized ‘an interest in and control of’ the Union to implement an extensive ‘pattern of racketeering activity’ that included mail fraud, embezzlement, bribery, and murder,” the joint memo recaps. “The claimed pattern of racketeering encompassed the ‘use of force, violence and fear to intimidate union members,’ and systematic racketeering activities by which corrupt union officers engaged in ‘fraudulent deprivation of union members’ money and property rights.'”

The 1989 consent order mandated that Teamsters members and officials be barred “from committing acts of racketeering activity and knowingly associated with various organized crime groups or persons otherwise enjoined from participating in union affairs.”

The rest of the 1989 consent decree includes such things as mandates on voting practices and the creation of an Independent Review Board “as a permanent part of the Union’s constitution.”

There were modifications to the consent decree in 2015, when the government and the union “agreed that the organized crime influence that the Government found to have reached the highest echelons of IBT leadership in 1988 had long been expunged, and the number and gravity of disciplinary offenses within the Union had substantially diminished over time,” according to the latest dual motion.

Most of that 2015 agreement dealt with the conduct of elections.

The latest proposed changes, referred to as the Final Order, “involve the provisions relating to union discipline,” according to the court filing. “Over the last four years, the IBT has devoted substantial resources to develop and enhance its internal investigative, disciplinary, and audit systems.”

Two positions disappearing

The latest proposal sees the eventual elimination of the Independent Investigations Officer (IIO) and the Independent Review Officer (IRO), who separately worked to enforce some of the disciplinary standards set out in earlier agreements between the union and government.

“The proposed Revised Final Order requires the IBT to continue to maintain rigorous internal investigative, disciplinary, and audit systems to effectively identify, address, and eliminate the influence of organized crime and all forms of major corruption within the Union,” the court document says. 

But that would not involve monitoring. The proposed final decree would be focused on the elimination of the positions like the IIO that were needed because of the criminal influence in the union, according to the court filing. 

“The IBT has demonstrated its ability to conduct effective internal investigations and audits,” the two sides say. “It is appropriate at this point to eliminate the IIO role and further reduce the Government’s and Court’ s role in the IBT’s disciplinary and electoral functions.”

If the joint memo is accepted by the court, the IIO would disappear on December 31. The IRO job would “sunset” three years after the Revised Final Order was approved.

In arguing for the court’s approval, both sides say the original agreement back in 1988 was needed “because of the influence of organized crime within the Union. The Consent Decree achieved its objectives of ridding the union of widespread corruption and organized crime.”

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Go search “factoring” in any trucking group on Facebook. Doesn’t matter which one. What you’ll find looks less like a conversation and more like a street fight. One driver swears it kept his business alive through the freight recession. The driver next to him says it quietly ate his margins for two years before he figured out what was happening. And somewhere in the comments, a third guy says if you need factoring, you were never running your business right to begin with.

None of those people are lying. They just had different experiences — because they ended up with different companies, different contracts, and different levels of understanding about what they were actually getting into.

On a June 2026 episode of The Long Haul podcast, Adam Wingfield sat down with George McWilliams and Ivan Martinez of Summar Financial to stop dancing around the topic and just go there. No sales pitch. No hit piece. Just an honest look at why factoring makes grown operators so emotional.

McWilliams didn’t waste any time getting to the root of it. “Who wants their money controlled by a third party? You’re working, somebody’s hiring you for a service, and here comes this third party in the middle. And at times, there may be an issue and your money gets held or charged back. With very good reason, that can create a lot of turmoil and a lot of dislike toward factoring.”

Sit with that for a second. You ran the load. You delivered on time. You did your job. And now there’s somebody parked between you and your own money — and when that arrangement breaks down, when it’s a Friday at 3:00 and your invoice just went on hold and you need fuel to get home and the phone’s going to voicemail — that doesn’t feel like a business problem. That feels like somebody took something from you.

Every single person in that conversation — Wingfield, McWilliams, Martinez — kept landing on the same thing: is that factoring’s fault, or is that what happens when you pick the wrong company and skip the fine print?

Almost always? The fine print.

The 36% Math — And the Part It Leaves Out

There’s a LinkedIn post from Scott Reiser that gets passed around trucking circles pretty regularly. The math in it is straight: if you pay 3% to get your money 30 days earlier than normal terms, you’re effectively borrowing at 36% per year. His verdict — factoring is a payday loan for trucking companies, nothing more.

The numbers aren’t wrong. But Ivan Martinez pushed back hard on what those numbers don’t include.

“If you’re strictly looking at factoring as only a payday loan, then all you’re looking at is the monetary cost,” Martinez said. “You’re not looking at any of your benefits. Same thing as if you were to go to an amusement park — it’s gonna cost you $50 to get in. But you’re not just paying $50 to get in. There’s all these things added to it.”

Think about what you’re actually buying when you sign up with a legitimate factoring company. Yeah, you get paid faster. But you also get somebody handling your billing. Somebody making the calls when a broker is dragging their feet on payment. Legal support if a broker goes under and owes you money. And in a lot of cases — fuel cards, tire discounts, maintenance deals.

Wingfield put it in plain terms: “I’m hiring an accounts receivable team that’s going to take that work out of my business. It’s just like if you outsource an oil change or go get your haircut. There’s a cost associated with the service.”

If you’re a solo driver who’s up at 10 PM chasing invoices, arguing with a broker over a short pay, and trying to figure out what you can even do about it — maybe 3% is cheap. Depends on your situation. No way around actually running your own numbers on it.

But let’s be real about one thing. Some of that criticism people throw at factoring? It’s earned.

How Some Factoring Companies Burned Carriers and Ruined It for Everyone

Wingfield asked Martinez point blank — has the factoring industry brought some of this reputation on itself?

“100%. Absolutely.”

No soft answer. Just yes.

Here’s the play that does the most damage. A company puts 1% or 1.5% out front. Carrier sees it, thinks it’s a deal, signs up. Then the fees start appearing on statements. A charge for every page you upload when you submit documentation. A fee to receive your own money via ACH. A different fee if you want it wired instead. A documentation handling fee — separate from the per-page one. And then, somewhere near the back of the contract in language nobody reads, a daily charge that kicks in on every invoice sitting past 30 days.

Individually, not one of those fees looks like it matters. But stack them up on a $1,000 invoice and see what happens.

Wingfield did the math live during the episode. “It’s 1% of a thousand bucks — big deal. But if you’re charging me $15 here, $10 here, all of a sudden on that thousand bucks, it’s turned into 7% by the time you factored everything in.”

McWilliams was direct about what he’d do first if a family member handed him a factoring agreement to look over before signing. Not the rate. The fees.

“They’ll give you the 1%, and then for every invoice page, they’ll charge you a fee,” he said. “I’ve seen contracts where to submit your documentation to get paid, there is a fee per page, a fee to receive your payment whether you choose ACH or wire, plus additional fees the factor adds on top of what the bank already charges.”

Not every factoring company runs it this way. But enough of them do — or did — that the carriers they burned remember it forever and make sure everyone in their circle hears about it. That’s where a huge piece of the online rage comes from. Not made-up grudges. Real money that went somewhere it wasn’t supposed to go.

Recourse vs. Nonrecourse — The Part That Nobody Sits Down and Explains

Wingfield asked Martinez what one thing he wishes factoring companies would stop doing. The answer came without hesitation. Not explaining nonrecourse.

This one clause causes more confusion and more arguments than almost anything else in a factoring contract. Here’s what it actually means, in real language.

Recourse factoring means if your broker doesn’t pay — or pays less than what’s on the invoice — the factor comes back to you for whatever’s missing. Say you factored a $1,000 load. They advanced you $800. Broker only paid them $500. That $300 hole gets pulled from your next advance. That’s your money they’re taking back. That’s recourse.

Nonrecourse sounds like the opposite — like the factor takes the loss when a broker doesn’t pay. And sometimes that’s true. But here’s what trips carriers up every single time: nonrecourse doesn’t mean you’re covered no matter what happens.

“If it’s not explained properly, you could be under the impression that no matter what happens, nonrecourse is going to kick in,” Martinez said. “And once I submit my invoice, I’ll never have to worry about that particular invoice again.”

That’s not what it means. Nonrecourse almost always only applies in one specific situation — the broker files for bankruptcy. That’s it. It doesn’t cover a broker who short-paid you because there was damage to the cargo. It doesn’t cover a paperwork dispute on the BOL. It doesn’t cover a delivery disagreement. Those can still come straight back to you even if the word “nonrecourse” is written across the top of your contract.

Martinez spelled it out. “If there’s damage to the cargo, that doesn’t have anything to do with the factoring. It has to do with the actual load itself. So the broker’s gonna deduct $300 of damage — that doesn’t fall under nonrecourse. You’re still gonna be liable for that.”

Before you sign anything, make the rep walk you through exactly when nonrecourse protects you and exactly when it doesn’t. Tell them to give you real examples — specific situations, not general language. If they get vague, keep looking.

But Do You Even Need Factoring? Ask This Before You Do Anything Else.

This is where the episode got really honest. And it came from someone who works at a factoring company.

“If you’re signing up to factor just because you want your money faster and you can afford to pay that percentage with no other reason, then yes, I can see where that negative perception comes from,” Martinez said. “Why do I want to give away a portion of my income? I personally don’t want to do it. The question is — what are your true needs?”

Start right there. Not with rates. Not with what other drivers are doing. What does your business actually need?

If you’ve got enough cash sitting in your account to wait 30 or 45 days on payment without losing sleep over your truck note or your insurance, you might not need a factoring company at all. Before you sign anything, try going to your brokers and asking for faster pay terms. Some will go 15-day net just because you asked — no percentage, no factor, no fees.

But if you’re tight, if you’ve got brokers who somehow always end up on day 44 of a net-30 agreement, and you’re lying awake at night trying to do the math on whether the money’s gonna hit before the note does — then yeah, paying 2% or 3% to make that problem go away might be the right call. It’s not just faster money. It’s being able to keep your head in the job instead of your phone.

“We all have a cost of doing business,” Martinez said. “If factoring has value other than just getting your money upfront, then it is not bloodsucking. It is the cost of your business.”

When Factoring Stops Being a Tool and Starts Being a Habit

Wingfield brought up something toward the end of the conversation that most people in this industry never actually ask themselves out loud: can you get so used to factoring that you’re still doing it long after you stopped needing it?

Martinez said yes. But he made sure to say that’s not always a bad thing.

“Maybe you love the fact that you don’t have to spend $40,000 a year on a back-office person,” he said. “They’re doing it for me already, and I’m paying a fraction of that depending on how large my company is.”

Fair. If it’s working and the cost makes sense, no reason to kill it just to say you did. But Martinez also said every carrier needs to be asking themselves regularly whether it’s still pulling its weight.

“You need to constantly reevaluate your business model. Does this work for me now? And a year from now, does it still work for me?”

Most don’t ask. They sign up when the cash is tight, the automatic deposits become routine, and four years later they’re still running invoices through the factor — even though the bank account has grown, the shipper relationships have settled down, and they could probably handle waiting on payment just fine. It’s just become something they do without thinking about it.

And here’s something else people find out too late: leaving a factoring company isn’t always as easy as just stopping. Most agreements have a 30 to 60-day notice period built in. There are rules for invoices still outstanding when you walk out the door. Some have exit fees. Martinez put it straight: “Make sure you understand how the contract reads so that when you are ready to move out of that factoring relationship, you know the ins and outs of how to finalize that agreement. It’s not a matter of breaking the agreement. It’s a matter of finalizing it.”

Know how you get out before you sign to get in. That’s not being negative. That’s just running a business.

What Actually Separates Carriers Who Make It From the Ones Who Don’t

Wingfield asked both guests — from where you sit, what’s the real difference between a carrier that survives the down markets and one that doesn’t?

Not the lanes they run. Not the size of the fleet. Whether they actually know their numbers.

“Know your expense per mile,” Martinez said. “Anybody that’s hauling — if you don’t know your expense per mile when deciding whether you’re gonna take a load or not, you’re gonna run yourself into trouble.”

That’s the number. That’s the one that tells you, before you commit to a load, whether it’s actually worth taking. Without it you’re guessing. And guessing in a business with margins this tight is how you end up broke doing a job you thought was paying you.

Wingfield said it flat out from coaching carriers over the years: “You can’t improve what you can’t measure. A lot of times you’ll see small fleet owners or owner-operators not measuring their profitability versus loss on a regular basis.”

Martinez also mentioned something he watches for on the factoring side that’s a real tell. A carrier who normally drops invoices every couple of days suddenly goes quiet for two weeks. No submissions. Nothing. Sometimes it’s vacation. More often something broke down — literally or financially. A good factoring partner notices that gap and picks up the phone. A company just processing paperwork doesn’t find out until the carrier is already buried.

“If I don’t know who you are after two or three years,” he said, “that’s on me.”

What Would Actually Happen If Factoring Disappeared Tomorrow

Late in the episode, Wingfield threw out a hypothetical that’s worth sitting with: what if factoring became illegal overnight? Just gone. What happens to trucking?

Martinez didn’t sugarcoat it. “It would fold. The industry would fold for at least six months until brokers and shippers got on the same page on payment terms. Because right now, you can say, well, you don’t need factoring because your broker offers quick pay. But how many brokers are offering quick pay? That number has dwindled in the past decade.”

McWilliams landed in the same place. “Unfortunately, there are so many carriers that need their money upfront. Those expenses don’t stop. The wheels have to turn and there’s fuel and maintenance and tires. I believe the number of carriers that use factoring outnumbers those who do not.”

Both of them, when asked what the ideal system looks like? You haul it, you deliver it, you get paid. Done. No 45-day float. No broker sitting on your money while they wait to collect from their shipper. No percentage coming off the top because the payment system in this industry moves slower than the trucks do.

That system doesn’t exist in trucking right now. Until it does, factoring is filling a gap the industry built — not one carriers asked for.

“It is unfortunate that there is a need for it,” McWilliams said. “But nevertheless, there is a need and there is an issue that needs resolution.”

Three Questions Operators Are Actually Asking

Q: My factoring company put an invoice on hold and nobody’s answering. What do I do right now?

First thing — write it all down. Invoice number, dollar amount, when you submitted it, every call you made and what time. Then hit every contact you have: phone, email, your account rep if you actually have one. If you’ve been with this company for any real length of time and you don’t have a direct rep’s name and number, pay attention to that — it says something about the relationship. Still no answer after 24 hours? Pull the contract out and find the dispute section and the termination language. Read both. The fix for the long run is getting your rep’s direct line on day one — before you ever need it — not scrambling for a name to call at 3:00 on a Friday when your fuel card’s not working and rent’s due Monday morning.

Q: One company is quoting 1.5% and another is quoting 3%. Why would I ever go with the higher rate?

Because that 1.5% might not be 1.5% when you see your actual payment. Ask both companies to send you every fee they charge — not the highlight reel, the whole list. Per-page upload fees, ACH fees, wire fees, document handling charges, daily fees on invoices that age past 30 days. Add all of that up on a load you run regularly and see what the real number is. Then get both of them to explain nonrecourse to you — not the general version, specific situations where it covers you and where it doesn’t. And before you sign with either one, ask for two or three carriers you can actually call — not website testimonials, real people. Someone who’s been with them through a dispute or a hold will tell you more in five minutes than any rate sheet ever will.

Q: I’ve been factoring for three years. How do I know when it’s time to walk away?

Add up every dollar you paid in factoring fees over the last 12 months. The actual dollar amount — not the percentage. Then ask yourself honestly: if your brokers paid on normal 30 to 45-day terms, could you cover everything without missing a payment? Truck note, fuel, insurance, all of it. If yes, and if your brokers are actually reliable about paying, you’ve probably outgrown it. If no, figure out the real reason. Not enough cash cushion built up? Brokers who always stretch past 30 days? Both of those have a specific fix that doesn’t involve factoring forever. And when you are ready to leave, read the contract before you do a single thing. Find the notice period. Find out what happens to invoices still out there. Find out if there’s a fee to exit. Leave when you’re ready, not because you missed something in the fine print two years after you signed it.

The post They Called It a Trap. A Factoring Company Agreed — Then Explained Why You’re Using It Wrong. appeared first on FreightWaves.

The post AI First: How Fura Grew 800% During Freight Slump | Logistics appeared first on FreightWaves.

FreightWaves and Werner® surveyed professionals responsible for moving high-value and mission-critical freight. The results reveal widespread concerns around compliance failures, limited visibility, carrier performance issues, and a lack of accountability across brokerage networks.

Download the report to learn:

• Why shippers associate lower freight costs with greater risk
• The biggest service and visibility challenges impacting critical freight
• How freight failures are driving financial and operational consequences
• Why accountability is becoming a top priority for shippers

Get the insights shaping the future of freight brokerage.

The post High-Stakes Freight Brokerage: Risk and Accountability appeared first on FreightWaves.

On May 22, 2026, the United States Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II that removed a legal shield freight brokers have relied on for decades. Eleven days later, a White House Executive Order extended compliance obligations across the entire logistics chain — targeting forced labor, misclassification, undervaluation, and illegal transshipment with criminal enforcement authority.

These two events did not create new problems. They exposed problems that already existed and handed plaintiffs’ attorneys and federal prosecutors the tools to act on them.

The question every logistics operator should be asking right now is not whether they are compliant. It is whether they can prove it — cryptographically, at every handoff, in real time, in a format that holds up in federal court.

The answer, for most of the industry, is no.

The question is not whether you are compliant. It is whether you can prove it — at every handoff, in real time, in a format that holds up in federal court.

Here is what each entity type now faces and what the new documentation standard actually requires.

For twenty years, freight brokers operated behind a federal preemption shield. The Carmack Amendment and the FAAAA gave brokers a defensible argument that state negligent hiring claims did not apply to them. Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II eliminated that argument unanimously.

The Court’s holding is precise: state negligent carrier selection claims against freight brokers are not preempted by federal law. This means a plaintiff whose cargo was damaged, lost, or involved in an accident can now sue the freight broker directly for failing to exercise reasonable care in selecting the carrier.

The critical word is reasonable. The Court did not define it. That definition will be written in discovery, deposition, and verdict over the next five years. But the direction is unmistakable: reasonable care is moving toward a documentation standard, not an intention standard.

Checking a carrier once at onboarding is no longer reasonable care. A carrier who passes your FMCSA check at 9am can have their authority suspended by noon. You find out when the claim lands — and your onboarding record is the only documentation you have.

What reasonable care now requires for freight brokers:

• Live carrier screening at every load assignment — not cached, not periodic, not at onboarding only
• OFAC SDN and BIS Entity List verification at every handoff — not just at initial carrier setup
• ELD transit monitoring that is tamper-evident and cryptographically sealed
• A court-ready compliance certificate that documents every verification event with a forensic timestamp

The freight broker who can produce that documentation when a plaintiff’s attorney requests discovery is in a fundamentally different legal position than the one who cannot. The documentation does not eliminate liability. It defines the battlefield.

Non-Vessel Operating Common Carriers occupy a uniquely exposed position in the post-Montgomery landscape. Unlike freight brokers who arrange transportation, NVOCCs issue their own House Bills of Lading. They are carriers in the eyes of the law — which means they owe carrier-grade duties to shippers even though they do not operate the vessels.

This creates a compliance obligation that freight brokers do not face: the NVOCC is responsible for every party in the chain they assemble. The ocean carrier they book. The drayage operator at origin. The warehouse handling the cargo at the foreign port. If any one of those parties appears on OFAC’s Specially Designated Nationals list — before, during, or after the shipment moves — the NVOCC has exposure.

Civil OFAC violations can reach $377,700 per incident. The defense of ‘I’m just the forwarder’ carries no legal weight. NVOCCs are not forwarders. They are carriers.

The compounding problem is timing. OFAC adds and removes entities from the SDN list continuously. A consignee who was clean when the booking was confirmed may be listed by the time the vessel departs. An ocean carrier who was compliant when the service contract was signed may be flagged during transit.

The standard NVOCC compliance process — periodic screening, manual checks, annual reviews — does not address this exposure. It documents that you screened once. It cannot document that the party was clean at every moment that matters.

What the new standard requires for NVOCCs: live OFAC, BIS, IMO Registry, and Port State Control screening at every booking confirmation, vessel departure, and final delivery event, sealed to an immutable ledger with a forensic timestamp. Not a spreadsheet. Not an email chain. A cryptographically sealed record that proves the screening happened and what the result was at that exact moment.

Customs brokers have always operated at the intersection of legal responsibility and client dependency. You certify what your importer tells you. You file the documentation they provide. When that documentation is wrong — intentionally or not — your name is on the filing.

The June 3, 2026 Executive Order changed the enforcement priority calculus significantly. DHS and DOJ are now directed to heavily prioritize four specific areas: forced labor, misclassification, undervaluation, and illegal transshipment. These are not new violations. They are the violations that customs brokers have always been theoretically exposed to. The difference is enforcement intensity.

The EO requires importers to certify compliance with anti-smuggling laws, submit detailed product specifications, and provide copies of exact export documentation filed with foreign customs authorities. The customs broker who helped prepare those certifications carries exposure when they are wrong.

The documentation standard that now protects customs brokers is not simply having a record of what the importer told you. It is having a forensically sealed, timestamped record that proves what was represented to you, when it was represented, and what verification you performed at the time of filing.

This is particularly acute for UFLPA compliance. CBP’s forced labor enforcement requires importers to provide clear and convincing evidence that goods from Xinjiang were not produced with forced labor. The customs broker who can point to factory-level physical verification — sealed to a ledger before the shipment moved — is in a defensible position. The one who cannot is not.

The question is not whether you trusted your importer. It is whether you can prove what they told you, when they told you, and that you acted on that information with reasonable professional care.

Freight forwarders occupy the most documentation-intensive position in the logistics chain. They arrange truck, ocean, rail, and air movements. They prepare export declarations, bills of lading, shipper letters of instruction, and insurance certificates. They coordinate customs clearance. They are the connective tissue of international trade.

They are also the party whose name appears on more compliance documents than any other entity in the chain — which means they are the easiest party for a regulator or plaintiff to pursue when something goes wrong.

You arranged the shipment. You did not drive the truck, load the vessel, or clear customs. But your name is on every document. Can you prove every handoff was clean?

The Montgomery ruling matters for freight forwarders even though its direct holding addresses freight brokers. The legal principle — that arranging transportation creates duty-of-care obligations — applies across the logistics chain. Courts interpreting Montgomery will look at what a freight forwarder knew or should have known about every carrier and party they engaged.

The June 3 EO compounds this. Freight forwarders who arrange shipments from high-risk origins — including but not limited to Xinjiang, Iran-adjacent trade routes, and Hormuz-transiting cargo — now face enhanced documentation requirements for every shipment in those corridors.

What the new standard requires for freight forwarders: a multimodal clean bill of health that covers every mode they arrange — truck at origin, ocean transit, port handling, air waybill if applicable, and final mile delivery. Each mode documented separately and sealed to a unified ledger. Not a file of PDFs. A cryptographically linked chain of custody that proves the entire journey.

Warehouse operators are the often-overlooked entity in logistics compliance conversations. They do not arrange transportation. They do not issue bills of lading. They do not file customs entries. They store and release cargo.

That release event is the most legally significant moment in their operation — and the least documented.

When cargo leaves a warehouse damaged, short, or with a compliance gap, the warehouse operator’s defense is the release documentation. In most operations today, that documentation is a paper form, a signature on a delivery receipt, or an entry in a warehouse management system that was not designed to be forensically defensible.

Cargo left your dock in perfect condition. The claim says otherwise. Your release documentation is a paper form someone signed in pencil. The carrier says it was damaged when they picked it up. You have no forensic evidence either way.

The post-Montgomery environment creates a secondary exposure for warehouse operators: if they release cargo to a carrier that is subsequently found to have been non-compliant at the time of release, the warehouse operator’s release documentation is part of the chain of evidence. A release record that shows no carrier compliance verification at the moment of transfer is a gap that plaintiffs will exploit.

What the new standard requires for warehouse operators: a Warehouse Release Compliance certificate that documents the condition of cargo at release, the carrier’s compliance status at the exact moment of transfer, and a cryptographic seal that makes the record tamper-evident. This is not a WMS entry. It is a forensic record of a legal handoff.

The Common Thread Across All Five Entity Types

Every entity in the North American logistics chain now faces a version of the same challenge: the documentation they have is not the documentation the new environment requires.

Paper records, periodic screenings, onboarding checks, and WMS entries were designed for an era when courts and regulators accepted good-faith compliance efforts as reasonable care. That era ended in May 2026.

The new standard is forensic. It requires:

• Live screening — not cached, not periodic, not at onboarding only
• Cryptographic sealing — tamper-evident, no post-event modification possible
• Forensic timestamping — NIST atomic clock, court-admissible
• Multimodal coverage — every transport mode in a single chain of custody
• Certificate output — court-ready documentation produced automatically at each handoff

The logistics operator who can produce that documentation when discovery is requested — or when a CBP auditor walks in the door — is in a fundamentally different position than the one who cannot.

The Supreme Court did not create this problem. It exposed it. The June 3 Executive Order handed prosecutors the mandate to act on it. The question now is not whether to solve it. It is how fast.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian Lynch is the CEO of EasyWorth, Inc., a North Carolina company that operates the Forensic Sovereign Standard — the only commercially deployed platform that cryptographically seals chain-of-custody documentation across all five North American logistics entity types on a single immutable ledger. EasyWorth produces court-ready compliance certificates satisfying the Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II reasonable care standard, the CBP June 3, 2026 Executive Order recurrent vetting mandate, and UFLPA forced labor documentation requirements. Lynch@easyworthsurcharge.com

The post The Supreme Court and the White House Just Changed Everything for Freight Brokers, NVOCCs, Customs Brokers, Freight Forwarders, and Warehouse Operators appeared first on FreightWaves.

Daily transits have collapsed from pre‑conflict levels of around 100–130 vessels per day – mostly tankers – to single- or low-double-digit daily crossings during the crisis, with some analyses reporting traffic at under 5–10% of normal levels at peak disruption. Several trackers and intelligence reports show hundreds of vessels stranded inside the Persian Gulf.

One of the largest to exit was the 16,000-TEU HMM Daon, which transited the strait on Monday, noted analyst Lars Jensen of Vespucci Maritime.

Fuel costs are easing as oil flows recover, said Freightos research chief Judah Levine, in a note to clients. “Bunker prices are down 25% from March highs and 12% since early June, while jet fuel is down more than 40% from its peak – though both remain well above pre-war levels,” Levine said.

Soaring costs and fears of tightening supplies at key bunkering centers had led shipping lines to implement emergency fuel surcharges on top of contractual adjustment mechanisms. That led at least one analyst to warn that shippers could be paying twice for increased fuel costs.

Those increases are just one factor behind climbing container rates as frontloading importers look to get ahead of Asia tariff deadlines and higher prices slated for July by manufacturers.

Trans-Pacific West Coast prices surged 19% to more than $5,700 per forty foot equivalent unit, according to the Freightos (NASDAQ: CRGO) Baltic Index – with daily rates already past $6,000. East Coast rates surged 13% to $7,400 with the daily level now above $8,000 and above the peak season high in 2025.

Asia-Europe rates climbed 13% to $4,700 per FEU and Mediterranean jumped 16% to $6,300 per FEU, both above last year’s peak season highs, wrote Levine. Carriers are targeting $1,000-$3,000 per FEU increases for July, “though resistance to increases may be stronger than what carriers have encountered so far if demand is approaching its peak.”

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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The post War’s over, but ocean rates face raft of challenges  appeared first on FreightWaves.

A broker has a load and three carriers willing to haul it. Which one is safe? For all the data our industry supposedly drowns in, there is still no dependable way to answer that question. And after this spring, the inability to answer it carries consequences that are harder to shrug off.

Two readings of the Supreme Court’s decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II are making the rounds, and both are wrong. The first suggests the Court made brokers liable whenever a carrier they hired crashes. The second, a reaction to the first, says nothing of substance changed. As usual, the truth sits between them.

Start with what the Court did not do. It did not announce a new duty of care, declare brokers automatically liable, or set any national standard for carrier vetting. It resolved a split among the federal circuits over one question, whether the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act preempts state-law negligent selection claims against brokers. The Ninth Circuit had said the statute’s safety exception preserves those claims, the Seventh had said it does not, and the Supreme Court unanimously sided with the Ninth. A plaintiff still has to prove the broker was negligent under ordinary state negligence principles, and a broker that vetted reasonably still has every right to prevail in the case. The substantive law of negligence did not change.

But anyone telling you the decision changed nothing is overcompensating. In roughly half the country, courts had treated FAAAA preemption as a complete defense, a way to get a negligent selection suit dismissed at the earliest stages of litigation and saving the broker substantial sums in litigation defense costs. That defense is gone. In those jurisdictions, the claims now survive the motion to dismiss and head much deeper into litigation, including expensive discovery, unless they settle sooner. And because ordinary care is a question of fact for a jury rather than a question of law a judge can resolve on the papers, there’s a real risk these cases run all the way to trial. That’s not nothing.

So the significance of Montgomery is not a new rule of liability. It’s that the decision removed the procedural exit ramp that let many brokers avoid thinking too hard about carrier selection. At the same time, it left exposed a serious problem our industry has grappled with for decades. There is no dependable way to gauge carrier safety at the moment of selection. 

A reliable signal, built on the wrong foundation

Predictably, the scramble to fill the void is underway. Brokers, through the Transportation Intermediaries Association, have petitioned FMCSA for a federal carrier selection standard and a public list of high-risk carriers. The Truckload Carriers Association has urged the agency to modernize how it determines safety fitness. And opportunists from within our industry and without are pitching all kinds of paid “solutions” to the glaring information gap. 

I share the urgency, but I don’t share the instinct about where to find the answer. 

Most of what is being floated leans on the two things I trust least when it comes to measuring carrier safety: FMCSA’s Safety Measurement System (SMS) data and its safety fitness determinations stemming from compliance reviews and focused audits. 

Take the data first. The most persuasive critic of using SMS to judge carrier safety is FMCSA itself. After three trucking associations sued over the public display of CSA data, the agency settled in 2011 and posted a disclaimer that still sits on the SMS website today. It tells prospective consumers of that data the scores are performance data the agency uses to decide whom to monitor, that a flag is “not intended to imply any federal safety rating” under 49 U.S.C. 31144, and that readers “should not draw conclusions about a carrier’s overall safety condition” from the data. Congress drove the point home in the FAST Act of 2015, pulling the property carrier percentiles from public view and ordering a National Academy of Sciences review of the system. The Government Accountability Office had already found, in 2014, that most of the violations feeding the scores occur too rarely to correlate reliably with crash risk and that the agency lacks enough inspection data to compare most carriers with confidence.

To drive this point home, when the American Transportation Research Institute ran CSA scores against actual crash data back in 2012, it found the Driver Fitness BASIC inversely correlated with crashes, with carriers that scored better crashing more, not less. And FMCSA’s own Volpe Center told the agency’s advisory committee the same thing. Read that again. A metric where a better grade predicts more wrecks is not measuring safety. It’s measuring whether carriers are checking compliance boxes or not.  

So, when folks urge FMCSA to publish SMS percentiles or otherwise use them as a barometer for carrier safety, they are asking the agency to brand carriers with the very data it has spent many years warning the public not to use this way, and for good reason. In short, that does not fix the data problem; it exacerbates it. 

Now the audit model. Currently, a carrier earns a safety rating (satisfactory, conditional or unsatisfactory) essentially one way, through a compliance review, and FMCSA performs roughly eleven thousand a year against a carrier population north of seven hundred fifty thousand. That ratio tells the story. It’s why most carriers have no rating at all, why ratings issued in the 80’s and 90’s are still on the books, and why the agency’s safety rating system draws so much ire. Any “fix” that relies on these ratings or contemplates some kind of expansion of them is severely short-sighted. 

A market for lemons

This is not, at bottom, a measurement problem, and we keep getting stuck because we treat it like one. It’s an information problem, and it has a name. In 1970 the economist George Akerlof described what he called the market for lemons, leveraging used cars to make the point. When a buyer cannot tell a good car from a bad one, he will not pay extra for quality he cannot verify, so good cars go unrewarded, manufacturers of those cars quietly leave the market, and overall quality sinks across the board. The insight earned Akerlof a share of the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics. 

Carrier selection is a lemons market. A broker cannot reliably see that a carrier is safe at the moment it books loads, so safe carriers struggle to prove their worth and unsafe ones hide in the crowd. We’ve spent years trying to solve it from the inside, refining a scoring system and an audit process never really built for that job. The more useful move is to notice that other safety-critical industries faced a similar problem and handled it differently. Notably, none did it by building a bigger government grading system.

To be fair, reaching outside the usual toolbox is not a completely novel idea. The FAST Act directed FMCSA in 2015 to build a Beyond Compliance program crediting carriers for safety investments above the minimum, and the agency’s own advisory committee recommended that a third party, not FMCSA, administer it. The National Academies pointed toward a statistical model borrowed from other fields. Each time, though, the conversation snapped back to SMS as the engine, keeping us in a decades-long feedback loop that has produced no fruit worth eating. 

We should go further. And we should start by asking ourselves a foundational question. Do we want a system that actually improves highway safety and keeps unsafe carriers off the road, or do we want one where we simply check boxes and carry on with business as usual? The honest answer is that, to date, we’ve only built and pitched systems that do the latter. “Do what you’ve done and get what you’ve got,” is the lesson we should take from our work to date. What we really need is not some new way to slice SMS data or safety ratings. It’s a different institutional structure that likely doesn’t lean on these at all. 

How other industries handled it

Construction handled a similar problem with the Experience Modification Rate. Every contractor carries a single number built from its actual workers’ compensation loss history, calculated by a neutral bureau from claims data it cannot massage. Below 1.0 means better than average for its class, above 1.0 means worse. And it has teeth. Many general contractors and public owners will not let a subcontractor bid if its EMR sits above a set threshold. Critically, no one asked OSHA to grade every contractor. The insurance data already existed, and the industry standardized it into a figure buyers could rely on in making purchasing decisions.

Aviation handled it with the IATA Operational Safety Audit. Airlines pass a standardized audit of their safety management systems on a periodic basis, run by accredited auditors. The government is not the primary grader. Major airlines won’t partner with or sell seats on another airline that hasn’t passed the audit, so the commercial pressure makes it effectively mandatory, and regulators including the FAA then recognize the credential to streamline their oversight. Registered carriers have run accident rates several times lower than the rest of the industry, a gap that has held for many decades.

Maritime handled it by rating risk and matching oversight to it, and our own Coast Guard does it here. Through its Port State Control program, the Coast Guard scores foreign vessels calling at U.S. ports on a risk matrix built from the operator’s record, the flag, the performance of the classification society that surveys the ship, and the vessel’s own history, then sends its limited inspectors to the worst performers first. Its Qualship 21 program runs the other side of that logic, rewarding the vessels with the strongest records with lighter, less frequent exams. And on the domestic side the Coast Guard goes further still. A towing company can earn its certificate either through direct Coast Guard inspection or through a safety management system audited by an accredited third party under Coast Guard oversight. 

Three industries, one pattern. A trustworthy signal built from real safety outcomes, a market that requires it because the parties relying on it have money at stake, and a government that sets the floor and polices the scorekeepers. 

What this could look like in trucking

I won’t pretend to have a fully-developed solution or that these external approaches translate cleanly to trucking. Obviously, we need to think carefully about our approach. The point is that the directions come into sharper focus once we stop looking so much inward. If we actually want to assess carrier safety and, in so doing, weed out unsafe carriers, we need solutions that are purpose-built for doing so.  

Two pieces do most of the work. A score that measures what a carrier has done, and a credential that measures how a carrier operates. They answer different questions, they cover each other’s gaps, and neither asks the government to do something it cannot.

Start with the score. Picture something a broker pulls up in seconds, the way it already pulls a carrier’s authority and insurance. Not a percentile that ranks a carrier against a shifting peer group, but a measure built from the carrier’s own safety outcomes, similar to an EMR or credit rating. The inputs are the things that actually track with crash risk. How often the carrier has crashed, adjusted for the crashes it could not have prevented. What its roadside inspections turn up, weighted toward the violations serious enough to put a truck or a driver out of service rather than the paperwork issues that do not. And, where it can be obtained, its insurance loss experience, which is the closest thing the industry has to a running tally of real-world crash data. Every one of these is an outcome, not a compliance box check, and that’s the whole point. The violations that feed SMS occur too rarely to predict crashes, as the GAO found. Outcomes do not carry that defect, because they are the very thing we are trying to predict.

The score would need to account for things like exposure (i.e., a fleet running fifty million miles a year and a one-truck operation running fifty thousand cannot be compared on raw counts) and age (i.e., a safety record should also fade with time, so the score weights recent experience more heavily than old, the way an experience modification rate rolls on a multi-year window and the way a credit score lets an old delinquency fall off). 

The hard case is the carrier with too little history to measure, and the score would have to treat it honestly. The construction model handles it. A contractor below a size threshold does not receive an individual experience modification rate at all; it carries the class average until it has generated enough loss history to stand on its own. The carrier score could behave the same way. A brand-new or very small carrier is not handed a number the data doesn’t support. It sits at a neutral baseline, plainly marked for lack of data, until it builds a record. And because the absence of a score is itself a handicap for a small carrier trying to win freight, the credential described next gives it a way to prove itself in the meantime.

A neutral party computes the score and publishes it, the way a credit bureau computes a credit score. It’s not a government score, and it is not a vendor’s proprietary one. It’s a standardized number built to a published method, so a carrier that disputes its score can see exactly what produced it and contest the inputs. Transparency of method is what the National Academies urged for SMS and never got. It should be baked in here. What a broker sees is not a mishmash of incoherent data, it’s a confidence level showing how much data stands behind it, and the components that drive it, so a demonstrably safe carrier is distinguishable from one nobody knows enough about yet.

Of course, a score built from claims and inspection history has one unavoidable gap. It cannot speak for the carrier that has no history yet. A second piece could fill that gap, and it’s borrowed from aviation and maritime.

Airlines do not earn their safety standing only by tallying past crashes. They submit to a standardized audit of their safety management system on a periodic basis, performed by accredited auditors against a published standard. The audit doesn’t ask whether the airline had a bad week or month. It asks whether the airline runs a disciplined operation, with real processes for the things that produce safety. Trucking has every one of those things to examine. Whether the carrier timely pulls motor vehicle records and queries the Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse before it puts a driver in a cab. Whether its drivers are qualified and its files complete. Whether it runs a maintenance program that discovers defects before they lead to accidents. Whether its hours-of-service and electronic logging are managed or simply installed. None of this novel. It’s the same ground a compliance review already covers, asked as a forward-looking question about how the carrier runs rather than a backward hunt for violations.

The credential would be voluntary, and it’s an answer for the carriers the score serves least. A new entrant with no record, or a small fleet that will take years to build one, can sit for the audit and earn a mark that says an accredited examiner looked at how this operation runs and found it sound. For a five-truck carrier shut out of a broker’s roster because it has no score yet, that’s critical. The audit could be tiered, light and mostly remote for a tiny fleet, deeper for a large or complex one, and renewed on a fixed cycle so it stays current. Scores and credentials then work as a pair. The score reports what a carrier has done. The credential reports whether it is built to keep doing it well. A carrier can be strong on one and weak on the other, and a buyer (i.e., shipper or broker) learns more from seeing both than from either alone.

Integrity is critical to the audit piece. Carriers cannot pay for the outcome. We accept this distinction everywhere else. You pay a home inspector, but you cannot buy a clean report on a house with a cracked slab. You pay an accountant to audit your books, but cannot buy a passing opinion on numbers that don’t add up. The integrity rests on four things. The standard is fixed and public, so nothing turns on the auditor’s mood. The auditor is accredited and can lose that accreditation for deviating from the standard. The carrier cannot shop from auditor to auditor for a better result. And the auditor’s fee does not ride on whether the carrier passes. Every credible certification in the economy works on these principles. 

So how does it play out in practice? Run three carriers through it. The brand-new authority shows up as unrated for lack of data. At its option, it sits for a tiered, mostly remote audit, and if it runs a clean shop it earns the credential within weeks and competes on day one while its score fills in over time. The established carrier with a strong record carries a high score and a current credential, so brokers book it with confidence, its insurance reflects the lower risk, and the FMCSA, seeing nothing alarming, spends none of its scarce review time there. The reward for running safe is lighter friction, the incentive today’s system fails to really give. And the carrier that starts to slip shows it first in the outcomes, a rising crash rate and worsening inspections, which drives down its safety score. Brokers fall away and insurers reprice long before any federal audit commences, and most will correct in light of market pressures. The few that do not are exactly the ones the outcomes data punishes and flags for a compliance review. 

Pulling it together

Every conceivable approach to carrier safety vetting will be met with a healthy dose of criticism. I get it. I’ve criticized many proposed systems myself. 

Perhaps the sharpest criticism to the approach I’ve posited above is one I’d raise myself. It goes like this: “In response to a system everyone agrees is broken, you propose to keep the broken part, SMS, and build a whole new system, next to it, and the new system doesn’t even do the thing the public most needs, which is to get unfit carriers off the road.” That’s a fair critique. 

To be clear, I’m not proposing to keep SMS. I’m proposing to retire the job it does badly. SMS was built as a government triage tool and then misused as a market tool. The outcomes score does the market work better, on data that actually tracks with carrier safety. As the score proves out, it should take over that role and leave SMS to whatever narrow purposes it actually serves, if any. 

The same outcomes data is better targeting for the reviews that do shut carriers down, and the credential is a verification the government no longer has to perform on its own. FMCSA sets and enforces the regulatory floor as it has always done, and then certifies/oversees the groups that perform the market functions of scoring and auditing carriers.  

Another objection, and this matters most to brokers, is that even a sound signal does not by itself create a safe harbor, and a plaintiff’s lawyer will wave any low number at a jury anyway. That’s true. A durable safe harbor, the kind that immunizes a careful broker, would almost certainly require an act of Congress. There’s no getting around that. But short of that, there’s no denying that a broker’s reliance on a purpose-built carrier safety vetting system would be infinitely more defensible than the current approach of relying on data that says virtually nothing about actual crash risk, if it can be read to mean anything at all. 

In sum, a standardized, defensible, outcomes-based signal beats a world where brokers are judged against an undefined standard using data the FMCSA itself disclaims.

The opening we shouldn’t waste

To be sure, Montgomery did not rewrite the law of broker liability. But it is an inflection point for carrier vetting and highway safety. For too long, we’ve put lipstick on a pig, and what has that gained us? By many accounts, a rising trend of fatalities stemming from crashes involving large trucks and buses. So what exactly do we have to lose by thinking outside the box for once? Carriers, brokers, shippers, the FMCSA and the public at large share a reason to take this up together, renewed by the recent publicity surrounding Montgomery. The worst use of this moment would be to spend it staring into the same box. The better one is to look up and out.

Brandon Wiseman is a partner with the Childress Law Firm and president of Trucksafe Consulting. The views expressed here are his own.

The post After Montgomery, Everyone Wants to Rate Carrier Safety. We’re Looking in the Wrong Place. appeared first on FreightWaves.

The revocations arrive as the Trump administration says it continues a broad enforcement campaign targeting foreign commercial drivers operating in the U.S.

Augusto Ramos Melo, president of Mexico’s National Chamber of Freight Transportation (Canacar), said the visa revocations occurred between April 2025 and April 2026 and were tied to tougher enforcement of U.S. requirements governing commercial drivers.

Speaking during a recent briefing marking his first 100 days in office, Ramos said the figure was shared by the American Trucking Associations and reflects actions stemming from an executive order issued by President Donald Trump in April 2025. Ramos was elected as Canacar’s president in March.

“These operators returned to Mexico after their work visas were revoked,” Ramos said according to T21.

According to Ramos, roughly 30,000 foreign truck drivers have been removed from U.S. operations during the period, with Mexican drivers accounting for about two-thirds of the total.

The visa cancellations represent one of the most significant labor disruptions to hit the cross-border trucking industry in years. CANACAR officials said the loss of drivers has begun tightening capacity and contributing to upward pressure on freight rates in the U.S.

“The only thing that happened here was the supply-demand effect, where obviously the cost of freight in the United States has been starting to have an upward effect,” Ramos said.

While Canacar has not yet quantified the economic impact, Ramos said the effects could become more pronounced if freight demand strengthens across North America.

Related: Laredo summit debates driverless freight corridors, B-1 truckers

United States vows continued cabotage enforcement

The visa revocations come as U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has publicly defended the administration’s efforts to crack down on cabotage violations and other regulatory infractions involving foreign commercial drivers.

During a recent visit to Phoenix, Duffy said Mexican truck drivers are permitted to transport freight into the U.S. and return to Mexico but cannot legally haul loads between points entirely within the United States without proper authorization.

“What we’re doing is working with Customs and Border Patrol, and we’re pulling the visas of those Mexican drivers who violate our rules, and what this is about is making sure that the American companies, American drivers have these jobs and these loads,” Duffy told 12news.

According to Duffy, approximately 3,200 Mexican commercial drivers have had their U.S. visas revoked since January for alleged cabotage violations alone.

Duffy said the Department of Transportation is working with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to identify and penalize violators.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration reinstated English-language proficiency violations as an out-of-service offense last year, allowing inspectors to sideline drivers who cannot adequately communicate in English.

In response, Canacar has launched an English-language training program aimed at drivers and their families to help operators meet U.S. requirements and maintain eligibility for cross-border work.

Canadian carriers report no similar crackdown

While Mexican trucking companies have been directly affected by the visa revocations, Canadian carriers say they have not experienced similar enforcement actions.

Mike Millian, president of the Private Motor Truck Council of Canada, said his organization is unaware of any Canada-based truck drivers losing B-1 visas or being arrested for violating U.S. cabotage laws.

“We have not received reports of Canadian truck drivers having visas revoked or being detained for cabotage violations,” Millian said.

Industry observers note that U.S. enforcement efforts have largely focused on activity along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Driver shortage concerns remain

The visa cancellations arrive at a time when North American trucking companies are already grappling with persistent driver shortages.

Canacar estimates Mexico currently faces a shortage of approximately 96,000 truck drivers. Ramos said nearly 30% of active drivers are older than 55, while only about 13% are younger than 25.

The International Road Transport Union has projected a global shortage of more than 2.8 million truck drivers by 2030.

Mexico holds top US trade spot in April

Mexico remained the largest U.S. trading partner in April, with two-way trade between the U.S. and Mexico totaled $86.04 billion in April, up 23.4% from the same month a year earlier, according to U.S. Census Bureau data analyzed by WorldCity. 

U.S. exports to Mexico totaled $35.34 billion, while imports reached $50.69 billion. 

Canada ranked second among U.S. trading partners with $64.8 billion in two-way trade during April, while Taiwan surged to third place at $29.6 billion.

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Oil prices are continuing their enormous decline on the gradual reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and other policy changes, with possible setbacks in those occurrences making little impact on the pace of the slide.

The fall in futures prices led up to the release Tuesday, price effective Monday, of a decline in the weekly average retail diesel price published by the Department of Energy/Energy Information Administration. The latest price is $4.832/gallon, a decline of 22.7 cts/g from a week earlier. 

That price is the basis for most fuel surcharges.

(There remains a significant inconsistency between the DOE/EIA price and that of the AAA. The vehicle owner-oriented group reported an average retail diesel price Tuesday of exactly $5.)

The latest DOE/EIEA price is the first one less than $5/g since March 9, which was also the initial number to show the impact of the Iran war. It’s also the seventh consecutive decline. The slide during that period is 80.8 cts/g. 

But the benchmark price is still up about 94 cts/g from where it was before the war started.

The decline in retail prices, as usual, is chasing the fall in futures prices. 

With a settlement Monday of $3.0931/g on the CME commodity exchange, ultra low sulfur diesel (ULSD) has fallen almost 52 cts/g since a recent high settlement on June 10 of $3.6126/g. At approximately 9:40 a.m. EDT Tuesday, ULSD was down just over 4 cts/g to $3.0530/g, a drop of 1.3%.

Since the start of fighting on February 28 into March 1, ULSD has settled less than $3/g just once: the first trading day after that weekend when the shooting began.

The highest settlement since the start of military action against Iran by the U.S. and Israel was $4.6084/g on March 20.

Market not swayed by uncertainty

Even news over the weekend that looked like the peace deal that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz might be in trouble had little impact on the trend of falling prices. After a brief surge when futures trading began Sunday night U.S. time, ULSD and the entire oil complex went back to lower numbers.

While there are still strong voices cautioning that the loss in supply through the Strait for all those months will eventually come back to haunt buyers in the form of higher prices, those that buy and sell oil do not seem concerned.

A lower forecast at BOA

Nor do Wall Street analysts. For example, the commodities research team at Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BOA) recentlyreduced its forecast for the average price of Brent, the world’s crude benchmark, to $82/barrel. It had been $93/b.

But even that report didn’t sound completely convinced higher prices may not be a possibility. 

With an average Brent price of about $90/b in the first half of the year so far, according to the BOA report, “this means that Brent would likely have to trade in the $70-80/bbl range for most of 2H26, but but volumes lost over 100+ days top 1.3 billion barrels.”

“Clearing mines and restoring flows to normal levels is likely to take months, not days, given the logistical challenges, implying that oil markets could remain in deficit until 4Q26,” the report said. “We estimate that production losses since the start of the war have averaged 11–14 mn b/d, with the supply gap being covered by demand rationing and inventory draws. These losses have made the Iran war the largest supply disruption on record, exceeding the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the first Gulf War in 1991.”

But even with those facts and other bullish factors like the need to restock inventories, a tighter market in 2027 would still see Brent average $70/b, BOA said, “if the peace holds.” 

The research team echoed a recent International Energy Agency report that said the surplus that was to be in effect this year before the war will reemerge next year to the tune of about 1 million b/d. The restocking needs will help keep the price about $70 even though that surplus would otherwise push prices lower, according to the BOA analysis.

The road to more supplies coming on to the market, volatile already because of the lack of consistency so far in keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, is likely to be up and down for some amount of time.

A flood of Iranian crude

For example, Bloomberg reported Monday that Iranian crude has been “flooding on to the global market again.” It’s been able to have those supplies rise because of the end of the U.S. blockade on exports, and is likely to get a boost also from the end of various U.S. sanctions on exports. 

“More than 30 million barrels departed for Asia in the past week — a mix of crude that had been blockaded by the US, and exports from Kharg Island, the nation’s top export facility in the northern Persian Gulf,” Bloomberg reported Monday. 

But as an example of the inconsistency that could make the road to normalcy far from easy, Bloomberg also reported that “ultimately, because the gush mostly reflects a clear-out of cargoes that were blockaded, the export rate will drop again. Shipping rates of 2 million barrels a day are high for Iran in recent years.”

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The post Benchmark diesel price falls below $5 per gallon appeared first on FreightWaves.

Maryland Governor Wes Moore was joined by state and local elected officials, rail and labor leaders at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the newly reconstructed Howard Street Tunnel. It marked the official opening of double-stack rail service at the Helen Delich Bentley Port of Baltimore.

“This is a transformative day for the Port of Baltimore and for Maryland,” said Moore. “Thanks to our public-private partnership, we have opened doors to shipping up and down the Northeast, increasing our shipping capacity at the port, creating thousands of new jobs and generating about $1 billion annually in economic benefits for Marylanders, all while reducing emissions and benefitting the environment.”

CSX ran a ceremonial train through the 131-year-old tunnel, opened by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1895, this past September. Regular service commenced several weeks ago.

The project expanded clearance by 18 inches and made similar improvements at 21 locations in Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania to allow for double-stack container trains passage to and from the Port of Baltimore. It’s expected to provide seamless double stack capacity from Massachusetts to Florida, and into Midwest markets.

Prior to the tunnel improvements, trains commonly detoured north and west out of Philadelphia to Selkirk, N.Y., using the CSX/B&O and River Line route instead of the Baltimore corridor. Another was to divert toward Hagerstown, Md., and hand traffic to Norfolk Southern for movement via its Lurgan and Harrisburg lines back toward Philadelphia, then rejoin CSX tracks.

Maryland officials cited the public-private partnership between the state, Federal Railroad Administration, and CSX (NASDAQ: CSX) for helping to complete the project for less than the estimated $566 million cost. That included investment of $217 million from the state, and $125 million in federal funding.

Moore was joined by CSX Chief Executive Steve Angel, Federal Railroad Administrator David Fink, and Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Angela Alsobrooks at the ceremony.

“With full double-stack clearance now in place, we’ve removed a long-standing constraint in Baltimore and unlocked a more direct, efficient connection between the port and inland markets,” said Angel. “This strengthens a critical link in our network and enables us to move more freight on existing trains, giving customers greater access, capacity and flexibility across the East Coast.” 

The port over time expects to increase container volume by about 160,000 containers annually. An estimated 13,000 new jobs are expected to be created from the expanding business, including construction jobs on the project itself as well as future operations, warehousing and logistics jobs.

Baltimore’s Seagirt Marine Terminal terminal operated by Ports America handled a record 1,113,309 twenty foot equivalent units in 2025. Weekly container ship calls rose from 12 in 2024 to 15; Mediterranean Shipping Co. will open a new Asia and Mediterranean container service July 1.   

“This is one of the most significant accomplishments in the history of the Port of Baltimore,” said Maryland Port Administration Executive Director Jonathan Daniels. “Expanding a 131-year-old freight tunnel by lowering the track 18 inches to provide the necessary clearance to handle double-stacked containers will generate more business and jobs for the port while also creating valuable environmental benefits.  Now with double-stack capabilities, the Port of Baltimore becomes the quickest and most efficient way to get containerized cargo to the Midwest.”

Ports America has invested more than $600 million in infrastructure, equipment and technology improvements in Baltimore since 2010.

“This is a game-changing initiative for Ports America Chesapeake and the container business at the Port of Baltimore,” said Ports America Chesapeake President Mark Schmidt. “We are deeply invested in continuing to make Seagirt one of the top performing container ports in the nation and the ability to double stack containers will assist in that effort.” 

At the same time, Mediterranean Shipping Co. is building a new container terminal at nearby Tradepoint Atlantic at Sparrows Point.

The project is expected to reduce truck fuel consumption by about 137 million gallons and truck vehicle miles by 1.2 billion over 30 years.

Baltimore handled 50 million tons of total foreign cargo in 2025, its second-best year ever. It’s the second-busiest U.S. gateway for autos, imported gypsum, salt and sugar, and export coal.

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Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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FreightWaves Today: Broad rail traffic gains show growing industrial economy

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That reality, Kiser argues, is exactly what drew Koch Disruptive Technologies to lead the company’s $35 million Series C, with continued participation from NewRoad Capital, the company announced Tuesday.

SPS Commerce, the largest publicly traded pure-play EDI company, generated $751 million in revenue in 2025, 96% of it recurring, from customers who pay annually for a full-service model in which SPS not only hosts the software but configures, maintains, and operates integrations on their behalf. 

“It is also a business whose revenue depends on complexity staying unsolved, where the service fee exists because the product was never built to make the service unnecessary,” Grace Sharkey, PR and Comms manager for Orderful told FreightWaves.

This investment is a direct bet against that legacy model. Mosaic, Orderful’s AI-native EDI solution that launched in December 2025, replaces the manual mapping work that has historically consumed months of IT resources by reading each trading partner’s specification document, generating compliant guidelines and maps, and maintaining them as specifications change. What has taken the industry 3 months or more now takes less than a week. The service fee, Sharkey explained, loses its reason to exist.

“The Mosaic launch was a meaningful inflection point, one that reinforced everything we envisioned when we first partnered with the Orderful team,” said Gregoire Lehmann, partner at NewRoad Capital. “The opportunity ahead, connecting the world’s trading partners through modern infrastructure, is even larger than we anticipated, and we have full confidence they are the team to realize it.”

“When operational teams stop managing EDI around its limitations and start running it as infrastructure, the results compound fast,” explained Sharkey. 

KBX Logistics, the transportation and logistics arm of Koch, cut its onboarding process from 95 steps to 32 while processing millions of EDI transactions per month. Koch Disruptive Technologies, the venture arm of the same Koch parent, had already seen what Orderful could do from the inside before committing capital to this round. 

“KDT invests in principled entrepreneurs building technologies that improve critical systems and workflows. … We see an opportunity to leverage the broader Koch network to support the team as they scale and expand their commercial partnerships,” said Jon Chisholm, managing director at Koch Disruptive Technologies. 

Other logistics providers tell the same story. Orderful told FreightWaves it has seen NFI cut onboarding time by 90%, bringing new partner setup from an average of 10 weeks down to under five days. Heartland Logistics Group reduced customer onboarding from six months to five days. Hirschbach Motor Lines went from four EDI outages in 45 days and nearly 500 lost loads under their legacy provider to zero outages after switching to Orderful, while cutting their EDI team from six people down to one.

The operational damage is not limited to companies in the logistics business. For Every Man Jack, a men’s personal care brand, the cost of staying on legacy EDI showed up in the one place that matters most to a consumer brand: the shelf. 

Sharkey explained that Every Man Jack’s on-time delivery rates dropped from 97% to 80% under their previous provider. After migrating over 50 trading partners to Orderful in six months, on-time fulfillment recovered to above 95%, transaction processing dropped from up to 24 hours to seconds, and two open order management roles went unfilled after the team departed because the operation kept running without them. 

Can AI save EDI?

What has always justified the managed service fee that Orderful’s model aims to demolish is the complexity sitting underneath EDI, something Orderful believes can be addressed through modern AI tools and its team of EDI experts. 

Sharkey explained that for legacy providers, someone has to read the trading partner’s specification, write the mapping, and update it every time a requirement changes. Orderful’s Mosaic removed that justification. Its transformation layer is built on AI-authored code that maps between the company’s application programming interface (API) and each trading partner’s specific EDI format. When a trading partner updates their requirements, Mosaic reads the updated specification and regenerates the transformation automatically. Underneath all of it, a continuous learning system turns every correction, every error pattern and every trading partner update into a permanent network-wide improvement.

“That is what it actually means to bring AI into EDI. It’s not a faster help desk, not a smarter monitoring dashboard, but a platform that makes the service layer unnecessary in the first place,” said Sharkey.

Sharkey said the capital will fund continued technology developments, including data visibility and intelligence solutions, alongside continued investment in commercial partnerships.

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The analysis is based on industry theft reports, commodity forecasts and public market research related to artificial intelligence infrastructure. Market researchers at S&P Global project that copper demand tied specifically to AI and data centers will more than double by 2040, increasing from 1.1 million metric tons in 2025 to 2.5 million metric tons. Additional forecasts suggest overall copper demand could rise by 50% over the same period as artificial intelligence, robotics and electrification reshape global supply chains.

A new target emerges

Cargo thieves have historically targeted goods that are expensive, difficult to replace and easy to resell. Consumer electronics, cigarettes and pharmaceuticals have all fit that profile at different times. Artificial intelligence infrastructure appears to be creating another.

The demand for AI infrastructure is accelerating rapidly. Technology companies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars into data centers and computing capacity. Those facilities require enormous quantities of copper, processors, networking equipment and memory modules. As demand rises, supply chains become more strained and the value of these commodities increases.

Industry trends suggest cargo thieves are adapting alongside the market. The thefts are not limited to traditional smash-and-grab operations. Organized groups are increasingly using fictitious pickups, carrier impersonation and fraudulent paperwork to insert themselves into legitimate freight transactions.

The recent indictment of eight individuals accused of impersonating legitimate carriers across Pennsylvania, Virginia and New Jersey offers one example of how these schemes operate. Prosecutors allege the group used stolen shipment information and fictitious pickups to steal nearly $5 million in freight, including copper and other commodities. The case did not involve AI infrastructure specifically, but it demonstrates how organized criminal groups are exploiting trust within the transportation process itself. As artificial intelligence infrastructure expands and more high-value components move through the transportation network, the incentives for cargo thieves are only growing.

Too early to tell?

It is important not to overstate the trend. Cargo theft involving AI infrastructure remains a small subset of overall cargo theft activity. Consumer electronics, food and household goods continue to account for a large share of reported incidents. The rise in AI-related theft could simply reflect the broader growth of data centers and the increased movement of expensive commodities rather than a deliberate shift in criminal strategy.

However, cargo thieves have consistently followed markets where value is concentrated. If AI infrastructure continues to attract investment at its current pace, there is little reason to believe criminal organizations will ignore the opportunity.

Rethinking risk

For shippers, carriers and brokers, the rise of AI-related cargo theft could require a different approach to risk management. Verifying an authority and confirming insurance coverage may no longer be enough when high-value infrastructure is involved. Companies may need stronger identity verification, secure document delivery, authenticated pickups and more robust audit trails showing who was verified, when and how.

The companies building the infrastructure for artificial intelligence are focused on the future. Transportation providers supporting that growth may need to spend equal time preparing for the threats that growth creates.

This analysis does not prove that AI-related cargo theft is the dominant form of cargo crime or that theft incidents will continue to rise. Public reporting on cargo theft remains incomplete, and many thefts go unreported or are classified differently across jurisdictions. The available data does, however, suggest that artificial intelligence infrastructure is becoming an increasingly attractive target and that organized criminal groups are paying attention.

Click here for more articles on cargo theft and freight fraud by Phillip Brink.

Eight indicted in alleged carrier impersonation scheme; prosecutors allege $4.49 million in cargo losses – FreightWaves

How hackers allegedly stole $1.7 million worth of condoms – FreightWaves

July 4 holiday period exposes supply chain vulnerabilities – FreightWaves

The post Cargo thieves are following the AI boom appeared first on FreightWaves.

Most fleets do not follow them. Not because the schedules are wrong, but because following them costs money, and money in trucking is tight. A fleet that moves its PM interval from 15,000 miles to 25,000 miles across a 100-truck fleet running 120,000 miles per year saves approximately 400 PM services annually. At a fully burdened cost of $300 to $500 per PM A service, that is $120,000 to $200,000 a year in reduced maintenance spending. On a spreadsheet, that looks like efficiency. On the road, it looks like brake adjustment failures, hub seal leaks, and out-of-service violations that cost more to resolve than the deferred maintenance saved.

What the violation data shows

The relationship between PM frequency and roadside violation rates shows up in FMCSA inspection data every day. Carriers with high vehicle maintenance BASIC percentiles are not randomly distributed across the fleet population. They cluster around specific violation types, and those types tell a story about what went wrong and where.

Brake adjustment violations, which account for a significant share of vehicle out-of-service orders, are overwhelmingly a PM program failure. A brake that goes out of adjustment between scheduled services is a brake that was either not adjusted at the last PM or was adjusted on an interval that does not match the wear rate of the operating environment. A truck running mountain grades in the Pacific Northwest wears brake linings at a different rate than a truck running flat Interstate in Nebraska. The PM interval has to account for that difference. A fleet running a single interval across all equipment, regardless of route, terrain, or load profile, will produce brake violations, and those violations will concentrate on the trucks running the hardest duty cycles.

Hub seal failures follow the same pattern. A hub seal that fails at 23,000 miles was not going to be caught by a PM A at 25,000 miles. It would have been caught at 15,000 miles. The difference between those two intervals is the difference between a $50 seal replacement in the shop and a roadside out-of-service order that costs the carrier a tow, a road service call, a delayed load, and a violation on its BASIC score that stays in the system for 24 months.

The cost of the extended interval

The fleet financial manager who extends the PM interval sees a reduction in parts spending, shop labor hours and vehicle downtime. Those savings are real and they are measurable. What does not appear on the same report is the cost of the violations those extended intervals produce. An out-of-service violation at the roadside costs the carrier an immediate delay, typically four to eight hours for a brake-related OOS, while the vehicle is repaired or towed to a shop. It costs the load, which may be refused or rebooked. It costs the driver, who is unpaid during the delay. It costs the BASIC score, which affects the carrier’s ability to pass broker vetting, win bids on contract freight, and negotiate insurance renewals. It costs the next roadside inspection, because a carrier with an elevated vehicle maintenance BASIC is selected for inspection more frequently under the FMCSA’s risk-based Inspection Selection System.

A carrier that saves $150,000 a year in deferred PM costs and incurs $300,000 in roadside repair costs, load claims, elevated insurance premiums and lost contract opportunities did not make a smart trade. The problem is that the $150,000 shows up on one line of the maintenance budget and the $300,000 is spread across operations, insurance, and lost revenue in ways that are hard to trace back to the original decision. The fleet maintenance manager who extended the interval does not see the insurance renewal. The insurance underwriter who raised the premium does not have access to the PM schedule. The broker who rejected the carrier for a high vehicle maintenance percentile does not know why the percentile is high. Nobody connects the dots because the dots live in different departments.

What the right interval looks like

The right PM interval is a function of the equipment, the operating environment and the failure modes the carrier is trying to prevent. There are ranges that work for most operations, and carriers that stay within those ranges consistently outperform those that stretch beyond them.

For a standard over-the-road tractor running 100,000 to 130,000 miles per year, a PM A interval of 10,000 to 15,000 miles covers the safety and lubrication inspection, including brakes, tires, lights, fluid levels and high-wear components. A PM B at 25,000 to 35,000 miles covers everything in the A plus oil and filter service, engine and driveline inspection, and diagnostic code review. A PM C at 12 months covers everything in the A and B plus alignment, scheduled component replacement and the annual DOT inspection required under 396.17. Trailers follow a similar structure, typically on a quarterly, semi-annual and annual cycle.

These intervals are what the component manufacturers recommend and what the best-performing fleets in the industry actually run. The carriers that extend beyond them are the carriers that show up in the violation data, and the violation data does not lie. It shows exactly which components failed, when they were last serviced, and whether the interval was sufficient. The answer, more often than it should be, is that it was not.

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At an investor conference in New York last month, C.H. Robinson CEO Dave Bozeman was asked whether the country’s biggest 3PL was in the market for an acquisition, something that was not believed to have happened on his watch that began three years ago.

Bozeman suggested at the time that the wait might be coming to an end. 

“We said we’re going to be disciplined and measured,” Bozeman said at the Wolfe Research Global Transportation & Industrial Research Conference. “Robinson has been around 120 years and has always done M&A. It’s just one of those things.”

Bozeman said the “ratios are good” at C.H. Robinson (NASDAQ: CHRW) for an acquisition, “and we feel like we’ve got the mousetrap that’s built, and we think that will serve us well.”

On Monday, the wait ended. Sort of.  

Specialized target

C.H. Robinson announced it was acquiring DeSpir Logistics, an Illinois-based “specialized provider of secure transportation and cargo escort services,” according to C.H. Robinson. DeSpir targets a market that C.H. Robinson described as “mission-critical, high-value freight across North America.”

The cost of acquiring DeSpir is a minor figure: $75 million for a company that had $62 million in revenues last year, for a surprisingly low ratio of 1.2X. 

Although there was no announcement about it when it was completed, C.H. Robinson actually has made an acquisition in the Bozeman era: a company called Breaker19, which specializes in oilfield logistics. C.H. Robinson bought Breaker19 in the fourth quarter of 2025.

No prepared statement was released at the time of the acquisition. C.H. Robinson’s annual 10-K report to the Securities & Exchange Commission says nothing about buying Breaker19, listing it only as a subsidiary. No information was provided on the price, which apparently was so low that the company did not even disclose the deal in its 10-K filing. It was not mentioned on either the fourth quarter 2025 or first quarter 2026 earnings call with analysts.

Within the more traditional brokerage business, the previous C.H. Robinson acquisition was in June 2021, when it acquired Europe’s Combinex Holding B.V. for $14.7 million. 

C.H. Robinson held almost $160 million in cash and related assets on its balance sheet at the end of the first quarter.

‘Premium, defensible services’

“This acquisition strengthens C.H. Robinson’s capabilities in premium, defensible services where security, compliance, and execution excellence are key decision drivers,” the company said in its prepared statement announcing the deal. “This builds on the company’s ability to deliver tailored solutions for highly sensitive, regulated shipments across industries such as healthcare, life sciences, data centers, aerospace, and high-value retail — where precision, pre-planning, and real-time visibility are critical. Demand for these services is accelerating as supply chains become more complex and cargo theft grows more sophisticated.”

C.H. Robinson does have capabilities in this area that will now be expanded with the DeSpir acquisition.

One C.H. Robinson executive quoted in the statement is Adam McDonough, vice president for Capacity.

He said the type of freight moved by DeSpir “requires an extra layer of protection.”

“This is the kind of cargo where the stakes are incredibly high, like life-saving pharmaceuticals that must stay within strict temperature ranges, or critical data center equipment that is frequently targeted for theft,” McDonough said.

His description of the deal said C.H. Robinson is a “large, highly efficient logistics engine with industry leading safety and fraud prevention, while DeSpir is a specialized operations team within it — designed to handle complex, high-risk, high-value freight with the greatest level of control and precision. This is a specialized service that many of our customers need.”

Also quoted in the release is Michael Castagnetto, the head of North American Surface Transportation (NAST) at C.H. Robinson. NAST is the largest segment at C.H. Robinson and contains its core brokerage activities.

“We’re taking very specific, nuanced expertise and coupling it with our scale,” Castagnetto said.

John Carr, the  managing partner at DeSpir, said “joining C.H. Robinson allows us to extend that expertise to more customers, while continuing to deliver the level of control and precision our customers have always expected from us.”

Bozeman was not the only C.H. Robinson executive at the Wolfe conference who addressed the issue about what it would take for the company to make an acquisition.

A high bar to buy

Damon Lee, the company’s CFO, spoke about the acquisition philosophy at C.H. Robinson in greater length than Bozeman, according to a transcript of the company executives’ interview with Wolfe analyst Scott Group.

“We have a very high bar for M&A,” Lee said. “We’re not going to make a mistake on M&A. But we had to get the company ready for an acquisition. And I would argue, six months ago, 12 months ago, we weren’t ready.”

Lee also forecast the type of acquisition that C.H. Robinson might undertake, giving an example that sounds similar to what it is getting in DeSpir. 

C.H. Robinson, Lee said, could look to acquire a “specialized small, medium-sized player that gives us capability that we don’t have today. You put the Robinson scale behind it. The ROI is incredible.”

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The post After a five-year wait, C.H. Robinson makes a broker acquisition appeared first on FreightWaves.

The drayage sector is experiencing a significant shift as coastal ports undergo major infrastructure expansions. 

Bo Bates, CEO of the Evans Network of Companies, said that optimizing chassis pools and accelerating gate-turn times are critical to maintaining fluid East Coast supply chains. 

During Monday’s live show of FreightWaves Today, Bates said carriers must leverage predictive container-tracking metrics to prevent costly port demurrage fees before cargo ever hits the terminal floor.

Midwest logistics innovations

Ari Silkey, chief operating officer at Transportation Equipment Network, discussed how midwestern shippers are restructuring their regional distribution networks. 

Silkey explained that modern logistics platforms must prioritize real-time asset visibility to combat unpredictable weather patterns and shifting rail schedules. 

By integrating high-velocity data points directly into route-planning software, carriers can optimize cross-docking operations and maintain reliable service levels throughout the region.

Integrating domestic tech

Steam Logistics CEO Jason Provonsha highlighted the pressing need for seamless technology integrations between domestic freight brokers and independent owner-operators. 

He pointed out that manual booking processes are rapidly being replaced by automated, API-driven tendering pipelines. 

This technological transition not only drives down administrative costs but also allows smaller trucking fleets to instantly access high-quality spot market freight.

Collaborative capacity sourcing

Fura CEO Jeff D’Angelo outlined the advantages of collaborative capacity networks for mid-sized shippers. 

D’Angelo said that co-loading and shared freight lane strategies are essential tools for combating the industry’s persistent, volatile margin pressures. 

By pooling shipment volume across non-competing businesses, shippers can secure reliable contract rates and build stronger, long-term carrier partnerships.

Keep up with the latest news on FreightWaves Today

FreightWaves Today livestreams weekdays at noon ET at http://tv.freightwaves.com/.

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The new facilities are located in Europe, Asia and the Americas near key air and multimodal hubs. Cross-docks are designed for rapid air-to-ground and ground-to-ground transfer, and to minimize storage in a traditional warehouse. 

All the transfer facilities comply with pharmaceutical handling standards established by the International Air Transport Association, UPS (NYSE: UPS) said in a news release on Monday.

In late 2024, UPS added two healthcare-focused cross-dock facilities in Milan, Italy, and Frankfurt, Germany. 

The fast-growing popularity of advanced therapies, such as cell and gene treatments, mRNA vaccines and GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, has increased demand for precision cold-chain services. Next-generation medicines have a much higher value and have much less tolerance for shipping errors, say UPS officials. With so much at stake, the best practice in healthcare logistics is toward fewer handoffs, more integrated networks and greater door-to-door accountability. 

Demand for temperature-sensitive biologics is projected to expand at an 8.3% compound annual growth rate through 2033, reaching an estimated $39.1 billion, according to Growth Market Reports. Temperature deviations from defined parameters are a major concern for drug makers, with cold-chain failures costing up to $35 billion per year and contributing up to 50% of global vaccine waste, the World Health Organization estimates. 

“What’s new here is greater network integration across air and ground flows, more control at handoff points, historically a major risk area, and faster, more consistent movement of temperature-sensitive freight,” said Kiel Harkness, vice president of healthcare strategy, in an email. “It’s about closing gaps in how the network operates for complex healthcare shipments.  Every time a shipment changes hands or modes, there’s potential for delays, temperature excursions and loss of visibility.” 

Each shipment moving through a cross-dock is continually monitored with sensors, allowing staff members to quickly intervene if there are signs of temperature changes. 

In April, France-based Geodis opened its first dedicated healthcare cross-dock facility in the Americas. The 78,000-square-foot container freight station, located near O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, features a custom-built 5,200-square-foot temperature-controlled addition. The bonded facility serves as a high-velocity hub for global air and ocean freight, allowing Geodis to maintain end-to-end internal control over temperature-sensitive healthcare cargo as it moves through the company’s freight forwarding network.

Healthcare focus

As demand for traditional, low-yield parcel delivery slows and profit margins erode, UPS has targeted healthcare logistics as a primary avenue of growth because pharmaceutical and life sciences companies are willing to pay a premium for complex services required to maintain ultra-sensitive medicines and biologics at optimum temperature throughout their supply chain journey.

UPS began expanding its healthcare unit before the Covid pandemic and has since invested heavily in cold-chain distribution facilities, packaging and transport for handling goods with strict temperature requirements, ranging from 35.6 degrees to 46.4 degrees Fahrenheit, 59 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit and frozen. 

In November, UPS completed the $1.6 billion acquisition of Andlauer Healthcare Group, a large provider of logistics and temperature-controlled transportation in Canada. It acquired Italian healthcare logistics provider Bomi Group in 2022 and two German-based temperature-controlled logistics providers — Frigo-Trans and BPL — in January 2025. The recently expanded UPS air cargo terminal at Incheon airport in Seoul, South Korea, includes a temperature-controlled facility to support pharmaceutical and perishable food customers.

Two years ago, UPS said it planned to double revenue in healthcare logistics to $20 billion through organic growth and acquisitions by the end of 2026. The company recently topped $3 billion in healthcare revenue for a quarter for the first time, management said during the first-quarter earnings presentation on April 28.

Integrated logistics rivals FedEx and DHL are also aggressively competing for healthcare business.

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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The post UPS adds 27 cold transfer facilities for pharmaceutical shipping appeared first on FreightWaves.

This inauguration of the $450 million infrastructure project, which reached substantial completion on Feb. 28, allows the largest cargo ships in the Atlantic trade to transit Norfolk Harbor with full loads. 

Spanberger highlighted the strategic importance of the achievement, noting that the port is “wide open for business.” She emphasized that the increased channel depth facilitates higher export volumes for Virginia’s agriculture and forestry sectors, including soybeans, wood pulp, and lumber, while driving down shipping costs and offering manufacturers greater reliability and efficiency for future operations.

This dredging initiative is a core component of the Gateway Investment Program, a comprehensive capital construction campaign that began in 2023. The program encompasses a range of high-impact infrastructure upgrades, including the completed $450 million harbor deepening and widening project, which also allows for two-way traffic for ultra-large container vessels (ULCVs) of 14,500- to 24,000-container capacity. Additional key components of the program include the fully operational $83 million rail expansion, which boosted annual capacity to 2 million twenty foot equivalent units (TEUs), and the $220 million conversion of the Portsmouth Marine Terminal into a deepwater heavy-lift facility. Furthermore, the $650 million renovation and reconfiguration of the North Berth at Norfolk International Terminals remains in progress, with construction now past the halfway point and completion projected for mid-2027.

The channel inauguration comes as the port advances its overall operational capabilities. The ongoing North Berth modernization involves installing four new low-profile ship-to-shore cranes and an expanded technology backbone. Once this work is finished, the port’s annual throughput capacity is expected to reach 5.8 million TEUs, and it will gain the ability to bring a fifth ULCV berth online. 

Sarah J. McCoy, Virginia Port Authority Chief Executive and Executive Director, noted that these projects are not merely about today’s needs but are intended to position the port for long-term growth. She stated that with these foundational elements in place, the port is assuring users that they can expand operations and cargo volumes without concern for outgrowing the facility’s capabilities for decades to come.

Norfolk Harbor, home to the massive aircraft carriers of Naval Station Norfolk, is federally authorized by Congress to be the only waterway channel on the U.S. East Coast that can be dredged to a depth of 55 feet. 

The project’s accelerated timeline, with construction beginning in December 2019 – nearly two-and-a-half years ahead of schedule – was made possible through a collaboration between state leadership, the Virginia Congressional delegation, the Virginia Maritime Association, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 

Sen. Mark R. Warner praised the use of funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, citing its role in creating economic opportunities for the Hampton Roads region and securing Virginia’s role in global commerce. Similarly, Sen. Tim Kaine stated that the project reinforces the port’s status as a critical pillar of the Commonwealth’s economic success, reinforcing his commitment to advocating for funding that keeps Virginia at the forefront of the supply chain economy.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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The post After $450M project, Port of Virginia goes deep to raise the bar among East Coast container gateways appeared first on FreightWaves.

A small federal rule affecting drivers is being scrapped by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). 

It was the second instance Monday of a Federal Register notice that made a minor change in regulation but one that does impact the mandates for a truck’s driver. 

In Monday’s Federal Register, the agency said it was implementing final rules for two changes it proposed last year and had opened up for public comment.

In addition to the elimination of a rule that had required a CDL holder to report any safety violations to their state of domicile, FMCSA also said it is eliminating the rule that a printed copy of the operator’s manual for a truck’s electronic logging device (ELD) be in the truck at all times. 

“Drivers are required to understand the operation of the ELD on the vehicle to ensure the accuracy of their electronic records of duty status and to present this information during inspections by enforcement officials,” the Federal Register notice said in its Monday announcement.

But the agency was blunt about its views on continuing the rule. 

“There is no readily apparent benefit to continuing to require that the user’s manual be in the commercial motor vehicle given the use of ELDs since December 2019,” FMCSA said in its post. “This final rule eliminates a regulatory burden on motor carriers without compromising safety.”

FMCSA opened a comment period on the rule May 30, 2025. The 60-day comment period spurred 24 comments from organizations as significant as the American Trucking Associations and the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. 

Comments back change

The split on the comments were 18 positive, four opposed and two described as “out of scope.”

“ELDs routinely have an electronic version of the user’s manual built into the device,” FMCSA said in summing up the voices of the commenters who favored elimination of the rule. “Commenters also mentioned that maintaining a user’s manual in the vehicle is a burden on motor carriers which can affect their safety measurement system scores in terms of violations cited during inspections. The commenters stated that its absence is usually not cited as a violation but could be.”

The summation of the few comments that argued in favor of maintaining the rule said the mandate “is not a major burden.”

“The commenters stated that drivers and law enforcement often do not know how to access the electronic version of the user’s manual, which can be complicated further by the various types of ELDs in use,” FMCSA said in its summary.

FMCSA, in explaining its rationale for axing the rule, noted that a digital version of ELD manuals are built into the device itself. If a device doesn’t have one, FMCSA said, the agency has a copy that can be accessed from its website.

“Finally, while this regulatory change removes the requirement to carry a printed user manual, it does not forbid motor carriers or drivers from continuing to carry a user’s manual for their ELD,” the agency said. 

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The post FMCSA drops rule requiring trucks maintain printed ELD manual appeared first on FreightWaves.

While negotiators try to work out a permanent end to the conflict that all but shut down Persian Gulf shipping and put a chokehold on global crude oil supplies, Drewry says shippers may still be in for a nasty postwar surprise.  

It’s an ocean transport two-fer the maritime analyst says shippers would be well-advised to avoid.

“Fuel-related charges more than doubled following the escalation of the Iran conflict, as carriers introduced emergency bunker surcharges while standard BAF (Bunker Adjustment Factor) mechanisms gradually adjusted to higher bunker prices,” Drewry said today. “This created a challenging environment for shippers, who faced not only rising transportation costs but also the risk of paying twice for fuel price increase.”

Average BAF Values: East-West Headhaul Trades

The price of benchmark diesel fuel rose from $506 per metric ton on February 27 – the day before the U.S. attacked Iran – to $961.5 per ton on March 19 March 2026, an increase of approximately 90% in less than three weeks.

“Faced with rapidly rising fuel costs and increased uncertainty, ocean carriers responded by introducing the Emergency Bunker Adjustment Factor surcharges (eBAFs),” said London-based Drewry.

BAFs that were mostly stable prior to the war on the east-west headhaul trades increased modestly on average from $449 per 40-ft. dry container in the third quarter of 2025 to $470 in the fourth quarter of that year, before declining to $419 the first quarter of 2026. Drewry cited data from Ship & Bunker.

The impact of the conflict became evident in 2Q2026. 

Drewry noted that while standard BAF fell to $406 as the fuel adjustment formulas had not yet fully reflected the surge in bunker prices, “the introduction of eBAF increased total fuel-related charges to $798, almost double the underlying BAF level.”

Since BAF calculations lag behind real prices, the full impact of the spike became visible in the third quarter, Drewry said, with the standard BAF increasing to $696, while the total BAF including eBAF soared to $1,088.

“This development raised a concern for shippers,” the analyst said. “Standard BAF mechanisms are designed to capture increases in bunker and oil prices, albeit with a time lag. However, the introduction of eBAFs creates the potential for duplicate fuel cost recovery, whereby carriers recover higher fuel costs immediately through emergency surcharges and subsequently through increased standard BAF levels as bunker price movements were incorporated into quarterly calculations.”

Drewry said Hapag-Lloyd agreed to withdraw emergency fuel surcharges once the higher BAF takes effect in July, to avoid duplicate recovery of fuel costs.

The justification for eBAFs appears to be weakening, said Drewry, as the temporary ceasefire agreement has eased concerns over further disruption to oil and bunker fuel markets. 

“The benchmark average bunker price has retreated significantly from its March peak, falling from $961.50 per ton March 19 to $764.50 on June 18,” Drewry said, according to Ship & Bunker.

“As a result, shippers are likely to be in a stronger position to negotiate the removal of eBAFs and a return to normal indexed quarterly BAF mechanisms. With the underlying BAF already capturing fuel price movements through established adjustment formulas, maintaining emergency surcharges in the current environment would be increasingly difficult to justify.”

Drewry advised shippers to closely monitor surcharge structures and ensure that emergency measures do not remain in place after the underlying BAF has adjusted to market conditions.

Read more articles by Stuart Chirls here.

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LTL carrier Saia has announced openings of two new terminals, the third consecutive month where it has expanded its physical footprint after not doing so at all in 2025.

In a prepared statement, Saia (NASDAQ: SAIA) said it was opening new terminals in Duluth, Minnesota and Columbia, Missouri “as part of the company’s continued investment in expanding and strengthening its nationwide network.”

The expansion comes after Saia said last month that it was opening new terminals in Marysville, Washington and Edinburgh, Indiana, also saying at the time the moves were “part of (Saia’s)  continued investment in network growth across the U.S.”

A month earlier, Saia said it had opened a new terminal in York, Pennsylvania.

None in ’25, lots in ’24

Saia did not open any new terminals in 2025. By contrast, Saia had ten separate announcements of new terminals in 2024. Those openings came after it and other LTL carriers picked up real estate from the carcass of the bankrupt Yellow Corp late in 2023. 

On the company’s conference call with analysts last month following its first quarter earnings release, CEO Frederick Holzgrefe said of Saia’s growth plans that in the prior 36 months, “we’ve invested approximately $1.8 billion in our network and fleet alone, representing more than 19% of total revenue during that time. This investment is a clear signal of our commitment to customers, and we believe we’re still in the early stages of fully realizing the benefits of these investments, which we expect will generate substantial long-term value for our shareholders.”

Lagging OR at the new locations

On that earnings call, Matthew Batteh, Saia’s CFO said its newer terminals, which would include the post-Yellow facilities, are operating at an operating ratio (OR) that is “still above company average” but in the quarter, “we saw them improve.”

“That batch of facilities year-over-year, they improved margins by over 2 points on the OR side, which is good,” Batteh said. “I mean they’re still in the upper 90s, and they are a drag on the overall.”

Of the two new terminals, Saia said Duluth was opened earlier in June, and Columbia commenced operations this week.

“The new terminals give customers expanded access to Saia’s network across key Midwest markets, with stronger regional coverage, and added capacity to support growing shipping needs,” Saia said in its announcement.

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The parent company announced the transaction on Thursday, saying Air Hong Kong will preliminary use the new medium widebody aircraft to serve mainland China and other regional destinations on behalf of leading customer DHL Express.

Cathay Cargo, a top 10 global cargo airline by traffic, operates its own fleet of 20 Boeing 747 freighters and manages cargo moving on Cathay Pacific’s passenger aircraft. It has ordered eight A350 next-generation freighter aircraft from Airbus. 

“The Cathay Group is strengthening our freighter fleet to support Cathay Cargo’s capacity growth plans, strengthen our network, and reinforce Hong Kong’s status as the world’s leading air cargo hub. The additional capacity offered by Air Hong Kong’s latest A330 freighter will complement Cathay Cargo’s future A350F freighters, providing us with greater agility to build our regional cargo network and making more options available for our freight forwarder partners,” said Dominic Perret, who heads Cathay Cargo, in a news release. 

The A330 freighter will join Air Hong Kong’s fleet in the fourth quarter, Cathay Cargo said.

The deal is noteworthy for ATSG because it is only the third A330-300 the company has paid to convert to cargo configuration and placed with a customer. ATSG, which has historically operated and leased Boeing 767 freighter aircraft, at one point had plans to acquire 29 A330s for cargo conversion. The first two planes were delivered to Turkey’s ULS Cargo Airlines last year. 

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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The new rule removed what many trucking stakeholders viewed as a redundant compliance burden.

The final rule was published in the U.S. Federal Register and took effect on Monday. Under the change, CDL holders will no longer be required to notify their state of domicile when convicted of certain traffic violations in another state.

FMCSA said the requirement became unnecessary after state driver licensing agencies fully implemented the Exclusive Electronic Exchange (EEE) system in 2024, which automatically transmits conviction information between states through the Commercial Driver’s License Information System.

“For years, CDL holders were effectively required to report information that states were already exchanging electronically,” FMCSA wrote in the rulemaking. The agency concluded that maintaining both reporting systems created unnecessary duplication without improving safety.

The requirement dates back to the Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1986, which required both states and drivers to report out-of-state convictions. Drivers had 30 days to notify their licensing state of a conviction, while states were required to transmit the same information within 10 days.

Over the years, technological improvements gradually reduced the need for driver involvement, FMCSA said. Congress directed the development of a uniform electronic reporting system through the Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act of 1999, and states ultimately adopted the exclusive electronic exchange framework that became mandatory in 2024.

Impact on trucking

For trucking companies and drivers, the practical effect could be largely administrative.

Drivers will no longer need to remember to file a separate report with their state licensing agency after receiving a conviction in another jurisdiction. Motor carriers also benefit indirectly because compliance departments will have one less driver paperwork requirement to monitor.

The change could affect owner-operators and small fleets, which often lack dedicated compliance staff and must track numerous federal and state reporting obligations.

Some industry groups supported the proposal when FMCSA issued it as a notice of proposed rulemaking in May 2025. 

Commenters including the American Trucking Associations, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, Energy Marketers of America and Veolia North America argued that the requirement duplicated information already exchanged electronically between states.

Not all concerns disappeared, however.

Law firm Fried Goldberg LLC noted the new reporting requirements “could also create documentation gaps” and “delays in accountability” in the case of accidents involving commercial vehicles.

Texas, California leads nation in CDL violations

FMCSA records show that Texas and California typically lead the U.S. in CDL violations and drug/alcohol clearinghouse violations.

In 2024, Texas recorded 34,933 controlled substance and alcohol violations, while 2025 saw at least 42,050 reported violations.

California recorded approximately 17,390 positive controlled substance and alcohol violations in the FMCSA Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse for 2024. State-level data for 2025 shows 25,706 total substance violation records.

FMCSA said the rule does not reduce enforcement or alter how convictions are recorded against a driver’s CDL.

Traffic convictions, license withdrawals and disqualifications will continue to be transmitted electronically between state licensing agencies. FMCSA said the safety oversight process remains unchanged because states are already exchanging violation information through the electronic reporting network.

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The news comes as the powerful Teamsters union in the United States claims that UPS (NYSE: UPS) is violating a collective bargaining agreement by steering parcel delivery to a subsidiary that relies on gig workers. It raises questions about whether UPS will eventually try to replicate the nonunion UK model in the United States as a way to reduce costs.

UPS will stop using employees as frontline delivery workers in the UK by June 2027, resulting in the elimination of more than 3,000 jobs at 51 sites, Unite said in a June 12 news release. The UPS workforce would drop from 4,000 to 800 people, it added. 

The union suggested the new UPS driver pool will come from self-employed individuals picking delivery assignments through an app and getting a piece of the delivery fee, similar to how an Uber driver functions. UPS actually envisions a model more like that of Amazon, which contracts with outside service providers who are responsible for managing fleets and hiring in their local delivery area, an industry source familiar with UPS’s thinking said. 

Some workers could be rehired by third-party contractors that UPS plans to partner with for last-mile deliveries, according to Unite. It’s also possible some third-party couriers could use independent gig workers to carry out deliveries.

The company is consulting with Unite and two smaller unions, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers a;nd the United Road Transport Union, about the proposed changes to UPS’s business in the UK and how they could be implemented. 

“We constantly review how we can enhance customer experience and improve efficiency in response to changing market demand. As a consequence, we are evaluating options for our business in the UK as we remain committed to providing the highest standard of service and value our customers expect across the UK,” a UPS spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Unite condemned UPS’s plan and said it is considering a strike to show its opposition.

“The way UPS is treating its workers is disgusting. Unite has made it crystal clear that UPS’ plans are completely unacceptable and if it doesn’t reverse them then all avenues including industrial action will be actively pursued,” said Unite General Secretary Sharon Graham. “This is an incredibly wealthy company trying to cynically further boost its profits by casualising its delivery service in the hope that no one notices.”

UPS had net income of $5.57 billion in 2025, a 3.6% decline from the prior year. 

U.S. driver dispute

The Teamsters made it official policy last week to challenge UPS for allegedly diverting parcel deliveries to UPS-owned Roadie, which uses independent drivers. Under the 2023 contract between the parties, all parcels moving through the UPS network must be handled by Teamster workers. But Roadie and outside analysts say Roadie doesn’t touch traditional parcels that move through the traditional UPS sorting system. Instead, Roadie provides same-day grocery and parcel delivery from retail stores to shopper residences, and delivers bulky items that don’t fit in UPS’s automated parcel sorting system.

Parcel industry consultant Satish Jindel argued in a FreightWaves commentary last year that UPS needs to leverage Roadie’s less-expensive outside delivery agents for B2C deliveries, which are too costly to make with unionized drivers and large vans, if it wants to stem loss of market share to other couriers and boost profitability. Employee drivers should be used for traditional B2B routes with multiple stops, he said. 

Incumbent parcel giants are under increasing pressure from shareholders to boost profitability, from retail customers that need low shipping costs to retain online customers and a swarm of low-cost startup couriers offering cheaper rates. It is difficult for them to economically compete with e-commerce fulfillment providers that operate from regional and local fulfillment centers when they still operate massive hub-and-spoke networks that were built for international or cross-country B2B service, with aircraft and other expensive infrastructure. That is why Jindel and other analysts have also urged FedEx to consider using gig workers for last-mile residential delivery. 

Click here for more FreightWaves/American Shipper stories by Eric Kulisch.

Write to Eric Kulisch at ekulisch@freightwaves.com.

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