Executive Vice President of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, Lewie Pugh, praised Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s crackdown on fraudulent commercial driver’s license (CDL) schools during a Thursday appearance on Newsmax’s "Wake Up America," calling it “a great first step” and predicting that investigators will “uncover many more” problems across the industry.
“This is something we’ve been talking about for decades,” Pugh said. “For far too long, it’s been way too easy to get into trucking, and it’s way too easy to be a trucking school.”
Federal officials have moved to shut down more than 500 so-called “CDL mills," schools Pugh said often “self-certified themselves,” with some states allowing “the same school that trains you, test you and get you to where you get your license.”
Pugh credited “President Trump and Secretary Duffy, and also Administrator [Steven] Bradbury” for “finally listening to truckers, listening to what drivers tell them.”
He added, “The people coming out of these schools [are] untrained, unable to drive properly. And it’s a real shame because it really puts a black eye on an industry that’s full, and I can’t stress this enough, full of well-trained, well-skilled professionals and carriers that do it right.”
Calling the crackdown “a win for America and highway safety all across the board,” Pugh said it should also reassure parents after some affected schools trained school bus drivers.
“We all want our children to ride to school safely. We all want to arrive to our jobs safely,” he said. “The American trucker, they get up every morning, want to do their job safely. I mean, the interstate highway is their home.”
But Pugh emphasized the effort must continue.
“I can’t stress enough, this is an important first step,” he said. “We need to continue down this path, because I think they’re going to uncover many more of these schools, and they’re going to find a lot of other problems that’s come to light here in training of truckers in the modern world today.”
Pugh also pushed back on claims of a nationwide driver shortage.
“We don’t have a driver shortage. We’ve never had a driver shortage,” he said. “What we have in our industry is a huge turnover problem.
“There’s 400,000-plus new CDLs issued every single solitary year in this country,” he added, arguing that poor training, low pay, and a lack of safe parking drive drivers out of the industry. “We have too many people coming into this industry. They’re not trained well … they’re not paid well and they leave the industry. So we have this constant churn.”
While the crackdown should “remove some of the folks from the industry that aren’t doing it the right way,” Pugh said it may not be enough to fully revive the sector, which he called “the longest recession in trucking history” since COVID-19.