Overdrive Radio

Arbritrary. Capricious. Those two words are a principal basis for owner-operator Jorge Rivera Lujan and fellow petitioners’ challenge to FMCSA’s non-domiciled CDL rule. The rule itself is strongly supported by most Overdrive readers, and the petitioners’ challenge saw significant action in the D.C. federal appeals court last week Tuesday, September 15. Tip of the hat to Overdrive’s own Alex Lockie for this early coverage of the discussions, laying out the reasoning plaintiffs' attorneys utilized to argue the arbritrary and capricious nature of the rule in efforts to knock it down entirely: https://overdriveonline.com/15834913 He's done a voluminous amount of work around the non-domiciled CDL phenomenon since the full extent of those licenses for foreign non-immigrant visitors to the United States became known last year. He did the research, offering this first attempt at a comprehensive public accounting of active non-domiciled lincenses last year: https://overdriveonline.com/15750917 And since then, with FMCSA’s moves to restrict eligibility last Fall, Lockie’s covered in-depth the legal ramifications as challenges emerged from non-domiciled operators themselves, including the named plaintiff on this case in Jorge Rivera Lujan. Regular Overdrive Radio listeners here have heard from Lujan directly, including this past Spring at the Mid-America Trucking Show. The owner-operator is a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient, and he’s been in the U.S. since he was a child, yet remains a non-citizen. Today on the podcast, sit in on the discussion amongst who argued last Thursday on his behalf, and in defense of FMCSA, before a three-judge panel in the D.C. federal appeals court. We learned a good bit from FMCSA’s attorney from the Justice Department, Simon Jerome, about the history of the non-domiciled CDL rules for non-citizens. Jerome noted the "safety gap" in foreign driving records the agency lived with until last year, when they sought the change after a series of crashes by non-domiciled drivers. Fundamentally, as suggested above, the case hinges on what FMCSA did or didn’t do to adequately justify the rule that strips an estimated 194,000 non-citizen drivers from CDL eligibility. In the podcast, hear the crosstalk in full. It makes for a fascinating window on legal proceedings at work, with the fate of FMCSA’s rule change hanging in the balance. As mentioned in the podcast, a timeline of events that led to the court proceeding last week: https://www.overdriveonline.com/15833346

Off the top of the podcast, the voice of Overdrive’s August Trucker of the Month Dee Zeeman, in a business partnership with wife, Bev, in the back office and hauling for now close to a decade now with authority as White Pine Transport. The name’s a combination of a couple different horse farms he remembers from his youth growing up in Utah, and as he tells up top, a name that just worked. Yet for this installment of our Trucker of theYearr contenders’ series of podcasts, we’ll emphasize, of course, that’s there’s much more to a one-truck business than the name. The Zeemans have made real strides as independents in this their second such tour through business following their first in the 1990s. They truly follow through on promises made, doing the hard work and doing it right, in spite of all the challenges the business and life itself throw at them. "We've developed a reputation, and we really try to get stuff there when it's supposed to be there," Bev noted. If there is ever a problem, "we're old-school," Dee said. "We believe in commuinication" early and often. Challenges have been real over what’s been a roughly 6M-mile, 40-plus-year career behind the wheel for Dee since he got his chauffer’s license in the early 1980s. Roughly six years ago, he suffered what would ultimately be a mild stroke, in fact, and attributes a quick recovery, back on the horse in just several days, to more than the fact that Bev got him to the hospital near immediately. "Intestinal fortitude," he said. "I wasn't going to let it get me down. To put it simply, I cowboy'd up and fought through it." It wasn't the first time the pair have worked together through a big life change,as you’ll hear in their story. The Zeemans were named Overdrive's August Truckers of the Month, the recognition putting them in running for the 2026 Overdrive Trucker of the Year award. Read our first feature story about them via this link: https://overdriveonline.com/15833020 Get your own business in the running through the end of this month: https://overdriveonline.com/toptrucker

Off the top of this Overdrive Radio edition, the voice of Atlantic Logistics CEO Rob Hooper talking about trust, responding specifically to a question about whether all the shipper, broker and carrier friction in today’s freight markets is driving wedges between the relationships. Regular listeners well know what we're talking about -- cyber fraud and identity verificaitons pingpongig back and forth between the parties, slowing freight bookings as the opposite, distrust, breeds all around. Our big broker-and-carrier-vetting survey this year saw 66% of owner-operators name principally negative impacts after the rise in carrier vetting platforms specifically. Among them was roughly 1 in every 10 survey respondent owner-operators who called out as principal impact the wedge of distrust increased scrutiny continued to drive between them and brokerage partners. Access the full survey results here: https://overdriveonline.com/15829986 In this week's Labor Day edition of the podcast, a look into the FTR Transportation Intelligence conference, an annual affair last week where late in the day Tuesday a rep from the National Motor Frieght Traffic Association, Joe Ohr, and the one and only Dale Prax, FreightValidate founder and now a strategic advisor to Truckstop.com, joined Hooper for this talk through issues of revenue fraud like double-brokering, increasingly sophisticated cargo theft rings, and what was on everybody’s mind Tuesday that first day of September after Departments of Transportation and Homeland Security announced the new White House fraud task force. Prax gives some background on it from his perspective, and you can read a whole lot more about it from Overdrive's own Alex Lockie’s in follow-on reports: **Initial announcement of CDL school sweeps, and task force: https://overdriveonline.com/15833705 **Targeted schools respond: https://overdriveonline.com/15834186 Prax calls back to 2023 when Vice President J.D. Vance was part of a group of Senators pushing for the idea of a fraud task force as a kind of “cop on the block” to police double-brokering and ID-theft-enabled revenue fraud, cargo theft by fraud, and the many other forms these interstate freight crimes take. Some credit can go to longtime transport attorney Hank Seaton for proferring the very idea of a task force years earlier, and for the current administration for advancing it in the current form: https://overdriveonline.com/15539812 Of course, as Prax also acknowledges, much of the meat of the announcement and subsequent press attention has been angled straight on policing CDL schools and immigration through English requirements and the like. Prax seems to read it as a way to garner more attention to the Dalilah’s Law legislation stalled in Congress and that would codify the FMCSA’s almost total ban of non-domiciled CDLs for non-citizens. The challenge against that rule is set for oral arguments in federal court just more than a week away at this point. Whether it will remain stading hangs in the balance. Yet given Vance’s lead involvement on the task force, and the demonstrated concern expressed by the Senator in past over longstanding cargo-theft and revenue-fraud issues, here's hope we can expect at least more intense prosecutorial footing on those fronts in the coming years. There’s plenty all truckers and other parties in legit freight transactions can do actively, too, as you’ll hear from Joe Ohr in particular in the panel. NMFTA has new threat-reporting and information sharing tools available that are free to participate in, detailed here. **New NMFTA portal: https://nmfta.org/standards/cybersecurity/cybersecurity-resources/nmfta-threat-report-portal/ **Overdrive's guide to cargo theft prevention: https://overdriveonline.com/15769312

A tip of the hat off the top of this week’s Overdrive Radio edition to our social media coordinator Jazzmin Campbell, who shared yet another towing mishap occurring in the city of Charlotte, North Carolina. It bears all the hallmarks of a parking-lot trap, the driver reporting a bill for upward of $9,000 in fees after he said he exceeded a time limit at the lot on Sunset Road by about a half hour -- mind you, during the big winter storm that hit the city with record snowfall back at the tail end of January. Judging by the reporting from the Charlotte TV station that had the story first, it’s unclear where exactly on Sunset Road in North Charlotte the lot in question was, but it’s certainly not the first time we’ve picked up on towing and botting shenanigans in that city and surrounding areas: WSOC-TV's report: https://www.wsoctv.com/news/local/charlotte-trucker-hit-with-9000-bill-after-exceeding-parking-limit-by-30-minutes/7IFIEUXET5GLXFZMQCTK4T7DY4/ Tow companies in nearby Gastonia, N.C., to the west and south of Charlotte may well have originated the region’s parking-lot-trap dynamics, where in past booting was quite common: https://www.overdriveonline.com/14894396 Just last year, the state of North Carolina explicitly banned the booting of commercial vehicles, regular readers will remember, yet private-tow tactics for parking enforcement clearly remain available to towing companies: https://overdriveonline.com/15749716 2025 Small Fleet Champ semi-finalist Mark Ledford’s small fleet early this year experienced a similar incident in Charlotte he and his driver were able to work their way out of utilizing the very terms of Charlotte’s towing ordinance: https://www.charlottenc.gov/cmpd/Community-Involvement/Local-Ordinances If the lot or the tow company in question violates signage and other regs there, that could be a very simple way out of an incident with involvement of the authorities -- if the truck hasn't already been towed, of course. And listen on for small fleet owner Robbie Turnage’s story of a tow gone bad -- and how he was able to, similarly, turn state law in Pennsylvania to his favor. Turnage’s tale is part of the roundtable conversation we conducted just prior to the 2025 Small Fleet Champ awards presentation at the National Association of Small Trucking Companies annual conference last year. We’re right in the middle of the 2025 entries research and judging round -- with announcements coming soon of the full slate of semi-finalist small fleets, certainly an exemplary, diverse group of owners this year. For now, dig into this conversation with Turnage and his Turnage & Sons milk-tanker fleet, Scott Denmark and Scott Cruthis of Thomasville Funiture Xpress, Wes Oberman of Oberman Logistics, and the small fleet named for and owned by Clifford Hay. As mentioned in the podcast: **Overdrive’s guide to beating back outrageous tow invoices: https://overdriveonline.com/15737212 **Our Small Fleet Champ updates with all of the owners featured in the re-air portion of the podcast from November 2025: https://overdriveonline.com/small-fleet-champ

This week’s Overdrive Radio features Overdrive Senior Editor Matt Cole's talk with our July Trucker of the Month. Based just outside Baltimore, owner-operator Jeffrey Crise runs open-deck freight, loading equipment quite often out of the port there and, as Cole wrote in his story late last month, the owner’s smack dab in the middle of a business fresh start: https://overdriveonline.com/15831345 Care to guess how the "Crise" last name is pronounced? He and Overdrive Editor Todd Dills had a bit of a laugh over that this past weekend as he worked to put this episode together. It's not like "crease," but another familiar word. Jeffrey "Cries," like a baby. Yet owner-operator Crise is nonetheless quick with a little chuckle remembering his first decade-plus-long run at a small fleet. Plenty others got a little bit of a laugh out of his company name and insignia on the doors during that first run at a small fleet. "People loved it," he said of the Hot Shootin's Haulin logo, Yosemite Sam featured prominently, on the sleeper of his units. The name of the biz nodded to his start with an F450 hotshot more than a decade ago, growing to five units and drivers at its high point before tough conditions drove him to shutter the operation just a couple years ago now. Today he’s back to hotshot flatbed work, pulling himself mostly with a Ram 3500, but likewise a Pete 579 now with a driver employed and at the wheel. His drive to push toward trucking success responds to improving conditions he felt he could see after just eight months away from the road. He could have retired, he said, but past failures didn’t sit well with him -- he knew opportunity was knocking when freight markets looked like they were turning in 2025. And Crise had learned plenty along the way, of course, maintained freight contacts with both familiar brokers and direct customers in the interim, all built on past performance -- bedrock on-time delivery and consistent communication, he stressed. If you take one thing from owner-operator Jeffrey Crise’s experience, here's hope that particularly the multi-truck current and aspiring owners can really feel the energy behind a top goal of his -- to truly serve the drivers. Serve them better than he did with the prior version of his fleet. He’s feeling good about prospects for that this year, he said. There’s stll time to get your own business, or that of another owner you admire, in the running for the Trucker of the Year award 2026. We’ve got three more Trucker of the Month semi-finalists coming through October. Make a nomination, or enter your own 1-to-3-truck business, at https://OverdriveOnline.com/TopTrucker