Jim Mullen knows plenty about the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. He’s been a trucking industry executive for many years, dealing with the myriad regulations the agency oversees and enforces.
But, most importantly his is the view of an insider. Mullen served as general counsel and acting administrator of the FMCSA from 2018 to 2020.
Since April, Mullen has been the president of the Truckload Carriers Association, a trade association which has 800-plus members with a combined fleet of more than 220.000 trucks and revenues north of $40 billion.
Jim Mullen
In short, FMCSA issued a detailed plan for retooling the agency that oversees more than 2 million registered motor carriers. The TCA’s proposal calls for FMCSA to focus more on its safety mission, and asks Congress to increase its funding markedly so it can do so.
The TCA white papers lays out 24 suggestions (listed at the end of this story) the association says will create “…a simpler, better resourced, more data-driven, and more accountable agency that is organized around its core public-safety mission and better equipped to reduce the human, economic, and societal costs of large-truck and bus crashes.”
In a recent interview with Truckers News, Mullen said the white paper was developed because the trucking industry has faced a difficult four-year stretch, with individuals gaming the system causing problems with rates and highway safety. He said the paper is intended to encourage Congress to modernize the FMCSA for the benefit of the industry and highway safety, and is not meant to be a criticism of the agency’s current performance.
“We’d like them to not have further distractions away from the safety mission,” said Mullen. “So, yes, we would like them to stay focused on the core mission of highway safety.”
So far industry reaction has been positive. Mullen said feedback regarding the white paper from TCA members and other association executives, including those at the American Trucking Associations, has been highly supportive.
He also said the Department Of Transportation and the FMCSA are aware of the proposal and generally agree that greater resources are required to fulfill the agency’s mission. However, Mullen said the DOT did not confirm if the department is aligned with the specific budgetary request made by the TCA proposal.
During his time in the FMCSA, Mullen said he saw program offices that were insufficiently staffed or funded to fulfill their missions. He said FMCSA’s budget is about $1 billion, but fully 60% of that is allocated to grant programs, leaving the agency with some $400 million for operations.
Mullen suggested raising the carrier registration fee – currently $300 – would provide the agency with the funds it needs to fulfill its mission while not having to tap the Highway Trust Fund, which provides its funding.
“First and foremost the staffing levels need to increase so they can do both the pre-operational vetting and have sufficient resources to do actual high-risk prioritizations and investigations, and make sure the state’s are correctly following the credentialing process,” said Mullen, who added the agency needs the staffing so it can do away with the self-certification process of electronic logging devices. “But to get rid of it, you have to have somebody watching the hen house so you have to increase resources to do that.”
He makes clear the white paper encourages the FMCSA to remain focused on its core mission of reducing fatalities and serious injuries, rather than becoming distracted by secondary regulatory issues such as broker transparency. It also makes clear that the agency needs substantially more resources to accomplish that. Mullen said the FMCSA needs as many as 600 The next step is to make the case to Congress.
TCA plans to present the proposal to the House Transportation Infrastructure Committee and the Senate Commerce Committee in hopes of securing the necessary funding, according to Mullen The association intends to create a condensed version of the white paper for these discussions and have noted that supportive associations have offered resources to assist in this stakeholder-wide effort.
Here are the specific recommendations TCA’s white paper made and why.
“FMCSA’s central challenge is not the absence of statutory authority or safety ambition, but the mismatch between the scale of its mission and the structure, tools, and resources
Congress has given it to carry that mission out.
“A modern motor carrier safety system should screen unsafe actors before they begin operating, use current operational data to make timely and reviewable fitness decisions, recognize verified investments in crash-prevention technology, and generate usable public knowledge about the causes of serious truck and bus crashes. It should also be funded and staffed in proportion to the size of the regulated population and disciplined enough to focus agency effort on the functions most closely tied to preventing deaths and injuries.
“The reforms proposed here are designed to move FMCSA toward that model: a simpler, better resourced, more data-driven, and more accountable agency that is organized around its core public-safety mission and better equipped to reduce the human, economic, and societal costs of large-truck and bus crashes.”
The recommendations include:
1. Substantially increase FMCSA appropriations, establish staffing benchmarks tied to workload and regulated population, and authorize dedicated fee-based funding for core safety programs and registries.
2. Narrow FMCSA’s statutory portfolio by discontinuing, simplifying, or transferring responsibilities that consume resources without materially improving crash prevention, and require dedicated funding for any new statutory mandates.
3. Fully deploy a single secure registration system for all FMCSA registrations, with meaningful pre-operational vetting, periodic renewal, and retirement of legacy systems.
4. Decouple commercial registration filing fees from the cost-recovery model, increase and expand fee authority, and allow FMCSA to retain those fees to support registration modernization, vetting, and safety oversight.
5. Require all property and passenger carriers seeking safety registration or a USDOT number to pay a filing fee through amended statutory authority.
6. Harmonize and simplify commercial and safety registration requirements, terminology, and regulations into one comprehensive framework.
7. Increase safety-information collection during registration and renewal, including disclosure of key safety personnel and operational safety systems.
8. Adopt stricter and consistent pre-operational vetting standards for all commercial and safety registration applicants, including full vetting before issuance of a USDOT number.
9. Issue only provisional registration or authority until applicants pass a new entrant examination and onsite review, with stronger revocation authority for fraud, misrepresentation, or noncompliance.
10. Require onsite new entrant reviews and treat them as true gatekeeping events rather than remote paperwork audits.
11. Make passage of a mandatory FMCSA- or State-administered new entrant proficiency examination a condition precedent to any USDOT number, safety registration, operating authority, or provisional registration.
12. Replace the outdated investigation-driven safety fitness regime with a single integrated oversight lifecycle that uses all available operational data to generate timely, reviewable, and public fitness determinations.
13. Reform the DataQs process by giving FMCSA final authority over data challenges, standardizing State review procedures, and adopting a nominal filing fee to discourage abuse.
14. Simplify the Motor Carrier Safety Assistance Program, reduce financial barriers to State participation, and impose stronger, more transparent performance accountability for grant-funded enforcement activities.
15. Require every State driver licensing agency to implement a real-time employer notification system for material CDL and licensing events as a condition of federal participation and funding.
16. Make strict State compliance with federal commercial driver credentialing standards a condition of participation in the CDL program, supported by mandatory audits, corrective-action orders, and meaningful sanctions.
17. Restore and clarify FMCSA’s authority to administratively assess civil penalties for commercial regulatory violations, including household goods consumer protection and unauthorized brokerage violations.
18. Replace self-certification-only listing models in safety-critical registries with verification-based frameworks, periodic renewal, audits, and fee-supported oversight.
19. End pure self-certification for the Entry-Level Driver Training provider registry by requiring pre-listing vetting, biennial re-verification, and risk-based audits.
20. End pure self-certification for the Electronic Logging Device registry by requiring pre- listing technical and corporate vetting, re-validation after material changes, and ongoing compliance testing.
21. Strengthen front-end qualification checks and continuous monitoring for medical examiners through verification, analytics, expedited removal authority, and fee- supported oversight.
22. Modernize the drug and alcohol testing framework by fully implementing oral fluid testing, authorizing hair testing, and adopting a clear federal marijuana policy for safety-sensitive transportation work.
23. Expand the Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse to include specified non-DOT testing results and permit checks for non-CDL commercial motor vehicle drivers in safety-sensitive functions.
24. Improve crash-causation analysis by creating a continuous, public-facing crash-intelligence system with standardized digital crash data, stronger coordination with NHTSA, and recurring anonymized public datasets.
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