Protect our highways. Hire our veterans.
I want unsafe truckers off our highways — and America's veterans in their seats
Opinion by Rep. Brian Mast published on August 12, 2026
One year ago this week, three Floridians senselessly lost their lives on Florida’s Turnpike near Fort Pierce due to the complete and utter recklessness of a truck driver with an illegal CDL license. If you are a foreign national driving a commercial truck in America, you should have to meet the same basic safety requirements as everyone else.
Three people died for doing nothing more than simply driving down the highway when a tractor-trailer driver made an illegal U-turn through an access point, cutting across traffic and leaving an approaching minivan with nowhere to go.
Their families will carry that loss for the rest of their lives.
We cannot bring those Americans back. But we can decide who drives on our highways and whether their senseless deaths are going to be another tragedy we forget — or a warning that finally forces us to fix a broken system.
I choose the latter.
America should not lower our standards to accommodate foreign nationals who cannot meet basic commercial-driving requirements. Full stop. Shortsighted state policies and lax federal oversight, like California issuing Non-Domiciled CDLs without rigorous verification of legal work status or language skills, are endangering each and every American citizen.
That is what President Trump’s Freedom Haulers initiative is about, and that’s why I’m proud to introduce the bill to make it law.
And this doesn’t have to be the case. We have the best trained drivers in the world. American veterans already possess the discipline, training, and experience needed on the road, and I can’t think of better training for our commercial trucking industry.
Now Congress needs to make that policy permanent.
That is why I am introducing new Freedom Haulers legislation to codify the program.
Freedom Haulers recognizes something the rest of the country should have recognized long ago: military experience counts. Veterans have the discipline, precision, accountability and experience that trucking demands. Qualified veterans with military heavy-vehicle experience can use existing federal waivers to avoid redundant road testing and get into the industry faster.
It is about getting Americans who served this country into the trucking industry while getting dangerous, unqualified foreign drivers off our roads. The Trump administration has made clear that Freedom Haulers is part of a broader effort to crack down on dangerous foreign drivers, restore integrity to the trucking industry, and give our veterans good-paying jobs here at home.
That’s why, with my bill and President Trump’s initiative, we will be creating a program that fast-tracks American veterans into the trucking industry, allowing veterans with qualifying military driving experience to skip the CDL knowledge test, in addition to existing mechanisms that can let them bypass the road/skills test, and use veterans’ benefits to pay for CDL training.
Federal law already requires commercial drivers to speak English and read road signs, but lax enforcement has allowed drivers who scored as low as 2 out of 12 on proficiency tests onto our highways.
Foreign nationals driving on our roads, who failed English proficiency tests, who can’t understand our road signs, and who don’t know the driving laws are a real problem in our country, and we don’t need to lose another American because of it.
It ends now.