New York will lose more than $73.5 million in federal money because the Transportation Department said last week that state has refused to revoke nearly 33,000 questionable commercial driver’s licenses for immigrants since an audit uncovered problems last year.
The department said that more than half of the 200 licenses reviewed during the audit had significant problems such as remaining valid long after an immigrant was authorized to be in the country. So the state was ordered to review all of this type of licenses and revoke illegal ones.
The federal government has reviewed records related to these non-domiciled CDLs in every state since Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy put a spotlight on this issue after an August crash in Florida that killed three people. Most states have either complied or are in negotiations with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, but California has lost $200 million. Several other states — including Pennsylvania, Minnesota and North Carolina — have been warned they are at risk of losing some funding.
“I promised the American people I would hold any state leader accountable for failing to keep them safe from unvetted, unqualified foreign drivers. I’m delivering on that promise today,” Duffy said.
Duffy has said that immigrants account for about 20% of all truck drivers nationwide, but these non-domiciled licenses immigrants can receive only represent about 5% of all commercial driver’s licenses or about 200,000 drivers. New York issued 32,606 of them. New rules the Transportation Department has announced will prevent 97% of those foreign drivers from getting a commercial license again.
New York officials have defended their licensing practices and said they are complying with federal law and that audits during the first Trump administration supported that.
This is not the first time that the Transportation Department had withheld or threatened to withhold funding from New York since Trump returned to office.
Duffy put a hold on $18 billion in funding for a subway extension in Manhattan and tunnels beneath the Hudson River for Amtrak and commuter rail trains. The Trump administration agreed Thursday to restore funding for the subway project. In February, a judge ordered the funding to continue for the tunnel project. Duffy also threatened to pull federal funding from New York if it did not abandon a congestion pricing fee for driving into a large swath of Manhattan and if crime on the subway system was not addressed. The state also fought those efforts in court and won.
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s spokesman Sean Butler said the action related to commercial driver’s licenses seems to be part of broad effort to attack blue states.
“This continues a yearlong pattern of Secretary Duffy threatening to withhold money that keeps our roads, subways, and other infrastructure safe for New Yorkers. We will fight back, and once again we will win,” Butler said.
Trucking industry groups have praised the Transportation Department’s efforts to get unqualified drivers off the road, crack down on questionable trucking schools and go after trucking companies that violate the rules and then just change their names and keep operating. The industry said that too often unqualified drivers who shouldn’t have licenses or can’t speak English have been allowed to get behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound (about 39,916 kilograms) truck.
“These enforcement actions will remove bad actors from the road and restore accountability to the system. Today’s action is an important step toward safer highways and a stronger, more professional trucking industry.” said Todd Spencer, who is president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association trade group.
But immigrant groups say some drivers are now being unfairly targeted. The spotlight has been on Sikh truckers because the driver in the Florida crash and the driver in another fatal crash in California in October are both Sikhs.
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