President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order this week to make it mandatory that truck drivers in America are “proficient in English.”
Note: There is already a federal law that mandates commercial vehicle drivers be able to read and speak English sufficiently but the Trump administration wants stronger enforcement of the law. The order asserts that the law “has not been enforced pursuant to Obama Administration guidance, compromising roadway safety as trucking fatalities have increased since this guidance was issued.”
The administration fact sheet cites a statistic about road safety that doesn’t offer data on trucks, writing that “Motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of death in the United States, killing over 120 people every day.” (The figure has never been as high as it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when more than 26 out of every 100,000 vehicle travelers died each year, as opposed to less than half that rate today.)
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said on Fox News today that truck drivers in America are “angry that there’s other truck drivers who don’t speak English.”
Duffy: “I get more feedback from truck drivers who are angry that there’s other truck drivers who don’t speak English. Barack Obama lowered the standards so you got a slap in the wrist if you didn’t speak English, where before they’d immobilize your vehicle. We’re gonna go back… pic.twitter.com/NRQEnCSdK6
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 29, 2025
Trump and Duffy blame former President Obama for “lowering the standards” and giving just “a slap on the wrist” for those truck drivers who didn’t speak English, “where before they’d immobilize your vehicle.” Duffy said, “We’re gonna go back to the pre-Obama era,” which he claims will “make the streets safer.”
Duffy seemed to put the onus on the drivers themselves, without any blame aimed at the businesses that employ the drivers.
Many on X are voicing their opposition to Duffy’s plan. Charles W.L. Hill, Professor Emeritus of Management and Organization at Foster School of Business at the University of Washington, responded: “There is a chronic shortage of truck drivers in the United States, currently estimated at 60,0000 to 80,000. This won’t help.”
There is a chronic shortage of truck drivers in the United States, currently estimated at 60,0000 to 80,000. This won’t help.
— Charles W.L. Hill (@charles_chill) April 29, 2025
Note: According to altLINE: “While 3.54 million truck drivers were employed in the U.S. in 2023, this is actually well below the number of drivers needed to fill all open positions within trucking companies. Quite simply, demand for truck drivers continues to outpace supply.”
X user Lawrence Fitzgerald replied to Duffy interview with a jab at President Trump’s sweeping tariffs agenda and wrote: “truckers will be more angry that [there] will be no products to transport soon.”
Another chimed in: “He’s lying. They didn’t enforce the standard because there was a huge shortage of drivers and non-English speaking drivers saved their bacon.”
One commenter talked about the propensity of politicians to wage war against straw men, writing: “Just another issue turned into a problem that doesn’t exist.”