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House Passes Major Trucking Bill, Ontario Training Audit Failures, & Supreme Court CDL Ruling | The Morning Minute
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In this episode, we kick things off by examining a sweeping piece of legislation that just cleared its first major hurdle on Capitol Hill. The House Transportation and Infrastructure committee has overwhelmingly approved the BUILD America 250 Act by a decisive sixty-two to two vote, drawing rare bipartisan praise from both OOIDA and the American Trucking Associations. Two provisions in the sprawling, thousand-plus-page bill are generating particular attention from truckers: mandatory bathroom access at facilities where drivers are delivering or loading cargo, and expanded funding for commercial vehicle parking under an improved version of Jason's Law, which is named after a driver murdered in 2009 while parked at an abandoned gas station.
Next, we head north to examine a damning government audit that's exposing widespread failures in commercial driver training oversight. Ontario Auditor General Shelley Spence's office sent undercover secret shoppers to six truck driving schools, uncovering shocking compliance gaps where two private career colleges provided only fifty-nine and eighty-one hours of training, well below the province's mandatory minimum of one hundred three point five hours. The audit also revealed that Ontario's Ministry had never inspected fifty-four of the province's two hundred sixteen registered private career colleges offering Entry Level Training as of March 2025, despite industry groups warning officials as early as 2017 that stronger compliance measures were desperately needed.
Finally, we cover a high-profile interstate legal battle over commercial driver licenses and immigration. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rejected Florida's attempt to sue California and Washington over the issuance of CDLs to immigrants who are not legally authorized to be in the United States. The case stemmed from a deadly crash on Florida's Turnpike in August 2025 involving a truck driver from India who held a valid CDL issued by California, with Florida's Attorney General seeking an injunction barring the two states from issuing licenses to applicants who are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents. The court's refusal to hear the case leaves existing CDL licensing rules in California and Washington intact.
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