(Just The News)—Rising scrutiny of 194,000 state-issued nondomiciled CDLs to foreign workers with poor English language proficiency reveal two routes to safety.
Rule change is one, done by the U.S. Department of Transportation in September and idled by litigation. Congressional action – Rep. Dave Taylor, R-Ohio, filed a seventh related proposal Thursday – to create a statute is the other.
Safety is paramount in the discussion. Collateral damage, however, includes American truckers losing jobs and experiencing wage reductions from less expensive labor invading their home soil.
“Secretary Duffy and the Department of Transportation have taken important steps to immediately make America’s roads safer by cracking down on non-domiciled CDLs and ensuring that anyone operating an 80,000-pound commercial vehicle can read road signs,” said George O’Connor, speaking for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. “OOIDA members and professional truck drivers across the country are encouraged by these actions. These road safety reforms now need to be codified in federal law by Congress so they cannot be reversed by a future administration and can keep our roads safe for the long haul.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said former President Joe Biden and his administration did no background checks and offered asylum and work authorizations to many people illegally coming into the country. The offer of work through a CDL came next.
“If you come legally, or you have a visa, or you’re coming from one state to another, you can get a nondomiciled CDL,” Duffy said in a network interview earlier this month. “These are the licenses that these foreigners are using. But to tighten up the rules means we’re going to have more safety on American roads.
“There were 200,000 nondomiciled CDLs issued to foreigners. We think 194,000 of them were issued illegally and would not comply with our new rule.”
A Sept. 26 rule change announced by Duffy came between the spotlights of triple-fatal crashes involving 18-wheelers in Florida on Aug. 12 and Oct. 21 in California. A federal appeals court in the District of Columbia this month temporarily halted the rule change for non-domiciled commercial learner’s permits and commercial driver’s licenses.
The rule would include mandatory in-person applications and stricter immigration status verification.
Enforcement of the rule is on hold while the merits of motions are being judged; in other words, the stay is not reflective of those merits. The trucking association likes the rule and has also spoken out in favor of four of the seven proposals tied to illegal immigration and CDLs.
Congressional action, O’Connor says for his organization, offers a more cemented path. A new administration, after all, could change rules of the Transportation Department.
The seven include one in the Senate and six in the House of Representatives, and two are from Taylor. Two are from North Carolina congressmen.
- Secure Commercial Driver Licensing Act (Senate Bill 3013), authored by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark.
- SAFE Drivers Act (House Resolution 5800), authored by Rep. Pat Harrigan, R-N.C.
- Non-Domiciled CDL Integrity Act (HR5688), authored by Rep. David Rouzer, R-N.C.
- No CDLs for Illegals Act (HR5863), authored by Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J.
- Protecting America’s Roads Act (HR5670), authored by Rep. Beth Van Duyne, R-Texas.
- Commercial Motor Vehicle English Proficiency Act (HR6233), authored by Taylor.
- Connor’s Law (HR3608), a proposal that codifies a presidential executive order, authored by Taylor.
None have passed their respective chambers of origination.
Litigation on the new rule involves its fast-track route. The public comment period is open, and so far the court doesn’t deem the threshold of emergency for procedural actions to be met.
For the policy in both the rule and the congressional proposals to be enforced and remain, a law better stands the test of time.
Todd Spencer, president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, said Taylor’s bill filed last week – Commercial Motor Vehicle English Proficiency Act – “aligns with OOIDA’s long-standing advocacy for stronger driver training standards and we appreciate his leadership in making our roads safer for our members and the motoring public.”
He also favors passage of Rouzer’s Non-Domiciled CDL Integrity Act.
“This legislation ensures only individuals with lawful immigration status and a legitimate reason to operate commercial vehicles in the U.S. are entrusted with CDLs,” Rouzer said. “We’re closing dangerous loopholes and restoring accountability. We must never, under any circumstance, jeopardize public safety by allowing those here illegally to get behind the wheel of a big rig.”
Spencer said, “Congress should act now to make it the permanent law of the land. OOIDA urges Congress to pass Representative Rouzer’s Non-Domiciled CDL Integrity Act, which would make these commonsense road safety reforms the law and protect the integrity of America’s licensing system.”
While the focus is rightly on safety, Duffy alluded to a secondary, albeit important, piece of collateral damage. And it is in line with second-term Republican President Donald Trump’s promotion of “America first.”
“When people can’t understand the English language, can’t read signs, and they don’t know the rules of our roads, that’s a problem,” Duffy said. “Americans aren’t safe. Also, we see that there are CDL mills, which are driver’s licenses mills where people are not being properly trained. They’re being pushed through, getting licenses, and then driving across the country.
“It’s driving American truckers out of business. And for American trucking companies, driving wages down. That’s not why we’re taking this action. But that’s real consequences of having all these foreigners come in.”
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
