They deleted the rule because the system already knows

Good morning.

Five weeks ago FMCSA deleted a rule you had been following for decades, on the grounds that the paperwork was redundant — the states already share this data electronically.

On Friday a federal judge froze part of that data-sharing operation.

The two are not the same fight. But they land on the same person, and that person is you.

Last Wednesday, 22 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia sued Homeland Security over records from that same system — names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and five years of licensing history for 17 million commercial drivers. On Friday, Judge Anthony Trenga froze the subpoena.

The court fight is about federal access, not the state-to-state exchange. Your convictions still move between states.

What changed is who is responsible for making sure they do. That is now you — and in 36 states, it always was.

INDICATIVE FIGURES. NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR PAID INTELLIGENCE.

Sources: FreightWaves, Land Line, CDLLife, Transport Topics, Federal Register.

What it took to answer one question 51 times

I promised this lookup in Issue #9. It is four issues late, and the reason is worth more than the apology.

The question sounds trivial: after the federal rule went away, does your state still require you to report a conviction yourself? One question, 51 jurisdictions, no authoritative list — a commenter asked FMCSA to publish exactly this list, and the agency answered in the rule itself.

So we compiled it. 36 of 51 jurisdictions still require it.

The naive way to build that table is to ask a model. Issue #13 showed what happens: it invents regulations with total confidence and no tell. A generated table would print “30 days” down the column — that is the number the sources are saturated with — and be wrong in at least six places. So instead: retrieval against the actual state code, a citation required or the cell stays empty, a human on every exception.

What that bought. Texas is 7 days — to both the state and your employer, so a Texas driver following the surviving federal 30-day employer rule is 23 days late under state law. Nebraska is 10 days with a misdemeanor attached. Massachusetts imposes the duty and sets no deadline at all.

And the four states we had already researched by hand? Two were wrong.

The 50-state CDL self-reporting lookup

Pick your state. Get whether you still have to report, the deadline, who to notify, and the statute it comes from. Free, no email required, every answer cited.

Three states are marked unresolved, and the page says so. That is the honest state of the law, not a gap in the tool.

ELD registry: further devices were removed and self-revoked this month, including several J. J. Keller units. Check yours against the FMCSA registry before your next inspection.