New York is set to lose over $73.5m in federal funding after the Department of Transportation announced on Thursday that the state had refused to revoke nearly 33,000 questionable commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) issued to immigrants.
An audit last year revealed that over half of 200 licenses reviewed exhibited issues, including many remaining valid long after the holder’s immigration authorisation had expired. Consequently, New York was ordered to review all such licenses and revoke those found to be illegal.
Federal scrutiny of these “non-domiciled” CDLs intensified after a fatal August crash in Florida, which killed three people and prompted Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to highlight the issue. While most states have either complied or are in negotiations with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, California has already forfeited $200m. Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and North Carolina have also been warned of potential funding losses.
“I promised the American people I would hold any state leader accountable for failing to keep them safe from unvetted, unqualified foreign drivers. I’m delivering on that promise today,” Duffy said.
Duffy has said that immigrants account for about 20% of all truck drivers nationwide, but these non-domiciled licenses immigrants can receive only represent about 5% of all commercial driver’s licenses or about 200,000 drivers. New York issued 32,606 of them.
New York officials have defended their licensing practices and said they are complying with federal law and that audits done during the first Trump administration supported that. Duffy also has threatened to pull federal funding from New York if it does not abandon a congestion pricing fee in New York City and if crime on the subway system is not addressed.
Gov. Kathy Hochul’s spokesman Sean Butler said the action related to commercial driver’s licenses seems to be part of broad effort to attack blue states.
“This continues a yearlong pattern of Secretary Duffy threatening to withhold money that keeps our roads, subways, and other infrastructure safe for New Yorkers. We will fight back, and once again we will win,” Butler said.
Trucking industry groups have praised the Transportation Department’s efforts to get unqualified drivers off the road, crack down on questionable trucking schools and go after trucking companies that violate the rules and then just change their names and keep operating. The industry said that too often unqualified drivers who shouldn’t have licenses or can’t speak English have been allowed to get behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound (about 39,916 kilograms) truck.
But immigrant groups say that some drivers are now being unfairly targeted. The spotlight has been on Sikh truckers because the driver in the Florida crash and the driver in another fatal crash in California in October are both Sikhs.
