New York Chose Noncompliance
Sean Duffy gave Albany four months to fix an illegal trucker-licensing program. Albany refused. The bill is $73.5 million, and the leverage only gets heavier from here.
Last summer, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) discovered that more than half of the license records issued to foreign‑national commercial drivers in New York were issued illegally. Of 200 sampled non‑domiciled commercial driver’s license records, 107 failed to comply with federal law: a 53 percent failure rate. New York currently holds 32,606 unexpired non‑domiciled trucking licenses. Put another way, there are around 15,000 truck drivers that we cannot track.
Talk about a security risk.
The 80,000‑pound commercial truck is the largest moving object on the American road. Federal CDL standards exist because the consequences of an unqualified driver at the wheel of one are catastrophic, borne not by the state issuing the license but by whichever family happens to be in the next lane at the moment of failure. New York’s decision to maintain a pipeline in which more than half of foreign‑driver credentials were issued outside federal standards was, in effect, a decision to externalize that risk onto the Americans and neighboring states who share the road with those drivers. The three people killed on the Florida Turnpike in August did not consent to that arrangement. Neither did the Americans paying the federal highway taxes that New York was receiving while operating a noncompliant program.
On December 12, 2025, FMCSA Administrator Derek D. Barrs decided to do something about it. He issued a preliminary determination of substantial noncompliance and gave Governor Kathy Hochul and DMV Commissioner Mark J.F. Schroeder 30 days to respond with corrective action. Four months later, Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy withheld $73.5 million in federal highway funds from the state.
And yet, New York continued to declined to revoke the licenses.
Most States Complied
None of this would warrant a $73.5 million federal penalty if it were an isolated New York phenomena. It is not. A nationwide audit was launched under Executive Order 14286, “Enforcing Commonsense Rules of the Road for America’s Truck Drivers,” which President Trump signed in April 2025. The resulting state‑by‑state audits have already cost California $200 million in withheld funds. Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and North Carolina have been warned. Most other states, told what the law required, chose to comply.
Again, New York chose differently. Governor Hochul’s spokesman, Sean Butler, described the withholding as part of a “yearlong pattern” of the Transportation Secretary targeting blue states, citing past disputes over congestion pricing, the Gateway tunnel, and subway funding.
But there was no explanation why the DMV’s own programming defaulted to an eight‑year expiration date for foreign drivers; why 107 of 200 sampled records violated federal law; or why the state’s initial response to a preliminary determination of noncompliance was to litigate rather than to comply. An audit is not a political campaign. It is a sampled review of files, with named drivers, named dates, and named deficiencies, each one documented in a 20‑page letter from the federal government.
Four Percent Was Not Enough
What Duffy does next should be tracked with attention. The $73.5 million represents roughly four percent of the National Highway Performance Program and Surface Transportation Block Grant funds apportioned to New York. Under 49 U.S.C. § 31314, if the noncompliance persists into a second fiscal year, the withholding doubles to eight percent, or roughly $147 million. Beyond that lies the more consequential step authorized under 49 U.S.C. § 31312: full decertification of the state’s CDL program. Decertification would prohibit New York from issuing, renewing, transferring, or upgrading any commercial driver’s license, foreign or domestic, until the state achieves substantial compliance. For a state whose ports, warehouses, and freight corridors depend on continuous CDL throughput, that is a deadline with teeth.
The Secretary should be prepared to use it, and should anticipate even strong push-back from New York. Restraint has already been tried. FMCSA gave New York 30 days to respond to the preliminary determination, then extended the window through four months of negotiation before the first dollar was held back. The state chose to litigate and issue press releases about blue‑state persecution rather than revoke the licenses its own systems were programmed to issue improperly. This issue will turn into a radioactive political football. If four percent does not create a corrective incentive. Eight percent might. Decertification would.
There is a reason Congress reserved these penalties for exactly this kind of systemic failure. It understood that states running licensing programs for safety‑critical credentials would occasionally be tempted to subordinate federal standards to their own political preferences, and it built the enforcement mechanism accordingly. For four months, Secretary Duffy asked New York to read the statute and comply with it. On April 16, he read it for them. The withheld funds will be released when the state can demonstrate that the commercial drivers on its roads hold licenses issued according to federal law. Until then, the bill is $73.5 million, and it should grow.
