Neither government release announcing this week's campaign claims a driver shortage.

Both are framed on safety [1][2]. The shortage is supplied by the coverage, and it is a claim the trucking industry's own trade association walked away from two years ago.

The number the ATA stopped publishing

The American Trucking Associations made the driver shortage famous. Its estimates ran 60,800 at the end of 2018 [7], a record 81,258 in 2021, 78,000 in 2022, 60,000 or fewer in 2023 [6].

For 2024 it published nothing at all [6].

Chief economist Bob Costello explained the earlier decline without much comfort in it. "It's gotten better for all the wrong reasons" [6], meaning freight demand fell rather than recruiting succeeded.

By October 2025 he had changed the claim itself: "What we have in the United States is a quality problem around drivers, much more so than an absolute number" [8]. In the same week's address he described oversupply rather than scarcity - "We have been in a sustained situation where supply has been more than demand out there" - alongside non-local trucking employment down nearly 7 percent from its 2022 peak [9].

That is not a hostile characterisation. It is the industry's own economist, at the industry's own conference.

The number that explains the dispute

Turnover at large truckload carriers hovers around 90 percent a year [10].

A workforce that replaces itself annually does not have a shortage of applicants. It has a job people leave. Costello conceded as much back in 2019, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics published an analysis concluding the trucking labour market "works about as well as the labor markets for other blue-collar occupations." His rebuttal narrowed the claim to the long-haul truckload segment and added: "Carriers repeatedly say it isn't that they don't have enough applicants for their open positions - they do" [11].

What the campaign actually changes

Three things [1]. The Military Skills Test Waiver window extends from one year to two years after separation. Seven more states join the Even Exchange Program, taking it to 34. Active-duty members can test where they are stationed rather than where they are from.

These are sensible administrative fixes. The question is scale.

DOT says "more than 40,000 Veterans have used this waiver" to date, with no start date attached [1]. The waiver dates to May 2011, and a July 2014 White House release recorded "more than 6,000" users at that point [5]. That is roughly 34,000 additional users across twelve years, about 2,800 a year, against a workforce of 3.58 million [12].

Even if every one of the 40,000 were still driving, cumulatively since 2011, that is 1.1 percent of American truck drivers.

Whether they are still driving is the hole in the middle of the premise. No source tracks retention of waiver recipients. The one study on veteran driver retention, from Omnitracs in 2016, is genuinely encouraging - 59 percent fewer voluntary terminations, 42 percent fewer accidents - and discloses neither its sample size nor its period [16]. A 2018 survey of fleets running veteran recruitment programs found only 20 percent reported successfully adding veterans, while another 20 percent could not say [17].

The 2014 expansion made the same argument this one makes. FMCSA Administrator Anne Ferro then: "we truly need their skills and training to fill the transportation-related jobs that help keep our economy moving" [5].

The two enforcement figures, and where they come from

About 26,000 drivers removed for failing English proficiency, and 30,000 commercial licences cancelled as illegally issued. Both are attributed by the Associated Press to the Transportation Department [3]. Neither appears in either DOT release [1][2].

The English figure is at least independently checkable. Enforcement began in June 2025, and Transport Topics reports the rule sidelining about 2,000 drivers a month since, sourced to ATA's Brenna Lyles [15]. Thirteen and a half months at that rate is roughly 27,000, consistent with 26,000.

Against AP's own denominator of about 4 million commercial licences, 26,000 is 0.65 percent and 30,000 is 0.75 percent [3]. The two should not be added; the populations overlap by an unknown amount and the metrics differ, one counting out-of-service events and the other licence cancellations.

The cancellations are also not federal. States do them, at federal direction through FMCSA corrective action plans, and one state disputes both the count and the characterisation. California's DMV says approximately 13,000, against a federal figure of more than 17,000, and states that all affected holders "had been granted work authorization by the federal government" [13]. DMV Director Steve Gordon: "This federal administration is using their war on immigration to remove qualified, hardworking commercial drivers from our workforce who meet language and safety rules" [13].

The underlying rule is worth reading for what it does not contain. FMCSA's final rule restricting non-domiciled commercial licences to H-2A, H-2B and E-2 status took effect on March 16, 2026. It cites non-compliance across more than 30 states, with error rates of about 25 percent in California, 53 percent in New York and 49 percent in Texas, and 17 fatal crashes in 2025 producing 30 fatalities. It gives no national aggregate of improperly issued licences at all - only "tens of thousands" [14].

What the rule actually says

One small correction worth making because it will be repeated. The skills-test waiver has no tonnage threshold. 49 CFR 383.77 requires two years operating "a vehicle representative of the CMV type the driver applicant operates or expects to operate" immediately preceding separation, plus a clean two-year record [4]. The "over 2.5 tons" formulation is AP's paraphrase [3], not the regulation.

The line most quoted from this week also belongs to last week. "We are removing more and more dangerous foreign drivers off our roads every day" is from the July 24 campaign launch [2], not the July 30 White House event, where Duffy said something blunter: "Illegal immigrants who can't speak our language have no business getting behind the wheel of a big rig" [1].