Leaders in the trucking industry appear optimistic that President Donald Trump will facilitate changes during his administration that will have positive impacts on the industry. These issues include health care reform, infrastructure investment and federal regulations.
Health Care Reform
President Trump met face to face with a handful of top trucking industry leaders and truckers in March to discuss a single issue – health care.
Chris Spear, president of the American Trucking Associations, speaking about the meeting in a video broadcast on the CNBC, said that the trucking industry has suffered from Obamacare not only because of the rising costs of health insurance and lack of patient choice, but also due to the “mandates, liabilities and administrative burdens” it places on trucking operations, especially smaller businesses.
According to Spear and others in trucking, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has worsened the truck driver shortage, increased regulations, and stalled growth and investments. The system is also so complicated that healthcare administration has to be “farmed out to third parties and consultants,” Spear told CNBC. President Trump has indicated that he plans to repeal the health care act, and as of late April Republicans were working diligently on a plan to reach a compromise in the House of Representatives that would replace Obamacare, while retaining only a couple of provisions of the program.
Under the proposed plan, states could obtain a waiver from the federal government to do away with certain protections of the ACA, Business Insider reported. States seeking the waiver would have to prove that doing so would lower costs, and they would also have to join a federal high-risk pool or establish a pool of their own. The provisions of Obamacare that are expected to remain intact, even if it is replaced, are those requiring that: 1) essential benefits be covered in health plans, and 2) the community rating scale remains intact. The scale requires insurance companies in an area to charge the same price for coverage regardless of factors like age or pre-existing conditions.
Infrastructure
Trump has promised to invest a trillion dollars into America’s infrastructure, which the American Society of Civil Engineers predicts will actually save domestic businesses even more — $1.1 trillion by 2040. U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who was appointed by Trump earlier this year, said the program will be unveiled later in 2017, and that the $1 trillion investment is expected to be spread out over a decade. Still there has been nothing definitive about where the funds for the program will come from except a vague statement from Trump about utilizing public and private sources.
Trump told a joint session of Congress earlier this year, “Crumbling infrastructure will be replaced with new roads, bridges, tunnels, airports and railways gleaming across our beautiful land. To launch our national rebuilding, I will be asking the Congress to approve legislation that produces a $1 trillion investment in the infrastructure of the United States — financed through both public and private capital — creating millions of new jobs.”
Infrastructure investment is good news for the trucking industry, which claims that “deficient” roads cost the industry more than $49 billion annually.
Regulations
One of the first actions Trump took as President was to issue a memorandum to federal agencies freezing new regulations. One trucking regulation – the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) Entry-Level Driver Training rule – was directly affected. Only two weeks away from its February effective date at the time, the date was pushed to March 21 by Trump’s order, at which time it was pushed out again to May 22. The rule’s compliance date is not until Feb. 7, 2020, and that has not been changed.
The rule sets national minimum training standards for entry-level applicants who want to get their commercial driver’s licenses or obtain certain driving endorsements after the 2020 compliance date. The American Trucking Associations has reported that it plans to push the Trump administration to force the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, a sub-agency of the U.S. Department of Transportation, to loosen other trucking regulations as well, including the proposed mandate to require a truck speed limiter on heavy-duty trucks.
According to an article in Truckers News, regulations on tractor-trailer emissions which were finalized at the end of 2016 by the Environmental Protection Agency could also be at stake if President Trump goes after it.
The standards are set to take hold in 2017 and will be phased in over a 10-year period, but some industry leaders have said they will push the Trump administration to re-evaluate the regulations, as well as to push out the 10-year implementation period. One trucking regulation that appears out of Trump’s reach is the electronic logging device (ELD) mandate, which was pushed through by Republicans in Congress in 2012 becoming law in December of 2016. Carriers have until December 2017 to implement certified ELDs to record truckers’ hours of service (HOS). Fleets already equipped with electronic logging technology will have until December 2019 to ensure compliance with the published specifications.
