Trump administration tightens English testing for CDL truckers

The Trump administration is tightening federal English-language testing for commercial truck drivers, framing the move as a safety measure while effectively turning licensing into a proxy border-and-labor policy.

According to The Hill, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that commercial driver’s license (CDL) holders will have to take an English test as part of a broader “CDL crackdown.” The administration’s case is simple: truckers must be able to read road signs, understand instructions from law enforcement and inspectors, and communicate in emergencies. Few would argue that a driver piloting 80,000 pounds of steel should be functionally illiterate in the language used on the roads.

The objection isn’t to language competence; it’s to the state’s chosen mechanism. Washington’s reflex is to solve risk with centralized gatekeeping: more testing, more enforcement discretion, and more power vested in the same bureaucracy that already controls who may legally work. Once “safety” is attached to a licensing regime, the regime rarely stays limited to safety. It becomes a convenient choke point for everything else politicians want—immigration signaling, labor-market tightening, and the occasional performative crackdown when headlines demand it.

CDLs already sit inside a dense regulatory web: federal standards, state issuance, medical certification, drug testing, and a compliance industry that exists largely because the government created it. Adding another required test sounds modest until you ask who administers it, how subjective it is, how often it can be retaken, what happens during roadside checks, and whether enforcement becomes selective. The Hill’s report points to a crackdown environment—exactly when rule enforcement drifts from neutral safety administration to discretionary policing.

There is also a basic incentives problem. In a market system, carriers that hire drivers unable to communicate adequately incur predictable costs: delayed deliveries, failed inspections, higher insurance premiums, more accidents, and lawsuits. Insurers and shippers already price risk. The state’s alternative is to preemptively exclude workers through licensing, then congratulate itself for “preventing” harms it can’t measure—while the costs (fewer drivers, higher freight rates, and more leverage for large incumbents) are very real.

If the administration’s goal is genuinely safer highways, it could focus on outcomes—crash liability, carrier accountability, and transparent safety records—rather than expanding the credentialing labyrinth. But in Washington, expanding the labyrinth is the point. Safety is merely the polite label.

The new English testing push will now move from announcement to implementation details. That is where the real policy is made—and where “reasonable” rules often become yet another barrier to entry, enforced by people who face little downside for getting it wrong.