The Trump administration just ended Biden’s COVID-era policy that allowed trucking companies to pass safety inspections with nothing more than a phone call—a policy that stayed in place years after the pandemic ended.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration scrapped remote audits in March and reinstated in-person inspections at trucking companies’ actual business locations, according to an internal memo obtained by The Daily Wire.
Remote audits were originally introduced as an emergency measure in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic made in-person visits difficult or impossible. While many pandemic-era policies across government agencies were phased out as conditions normalized, this particular virtual inspection framework remained in effect well into the Biden administration—long after federal and state COVID emergency declarations had ended.
The policy shift comes after a deadly February 2021 crash in Topeka, Kansas, exposed the dangers of virtual-only oversight.
A truck driver hauling metal pipes made a right-hand turn, causing the heavy equipment to slide off the semi-trailer, slam into five vehicles and another truck, and kill one person. The driver had an expired medical certificate and lacked the required duty-status records. The truck itself was missing an up-to-date annual inspection and had multiple load-securement violations.
The incident highlighted how multiple layers of safety failures—any one of which might have been caught during a thorough in-person inspection—went undetected under the remote system. Load securement violations, in particular, are difficult to assess without physically examining how cargo is secured to a trailer.
A month before the crash, inspectors conducted a remote investigation of the trucking company—meaning they never visited the actual business and instead reviewed documents virtually. Investigators closed the probe after a quick phone call with the company.
Critics of remote audits have long argued that virtual inspections create opportunities for companies to present misleading or incomplete information. Without a physical presence at a trucking company’s operations, auditors cannot verify whether the business maintains proper facilities, whether vehicles match their documentation, or whether safety protocols are actually being followed rather than simply documented on paper.
“Remote audits inhibit the ability to fully assess the motor carrier’s compliance and safety measures.”
Philip W. Thomas, deputy associate administrator for safety at the FMCSA, wrote in the memo that remote audits “inhibit the ability to fully assess the motor carrier’s compliance and safety measures.”
“This reduces the overall effectiveness of the onsite investigation process. Now that the public health emergency has ended, FMCSA is reinstating its pre-pandemic standard of conducting investigations with a meaningful physical presence at the motor carrier’s PPOB [Principal Place of Business] per PPOB policy,” Thomas wrote.
The emphasis on “meaningful physical presence” represents a significant departure from the more lenient virtual approach. The language suggests that even some nominally in-person visits conducted under the previous policy may not have involved sufficient scrutiny to constitute genuine oversight.
The memo emphasized that onsite investigations must involve substantive engagement—not just quick visits to the company’s address or drive-bys of business sites.
When an auditor arrives at the carrier’s business location, FMCSA now instructs them to conduct a “collaborative in person questioning cycle” with the trucking company. Before closing an audit, the investigator must submit the completed report to supervisors, and the findings must be “thoroughly reviewed for quality and legal sufficiency by the division office, and any other required reviewers.”
The new protocols also establish additional layers of accountability within the inspection process itself. By requiring multiple levels of review before investigations can be closed, the FMCSA aims to prevent individual auditors from cutting corners or rubber-stamping approvals without adequate documentation.
Only in extenuating circumstances—such as difficult travel considerations or time constraints—can investigators close investigations virtually, the memo added.
The change is part of the Trump administration’s broader crackdown on trucking-industry safety following devastating collisions caused by illegal immigrant truckers and unqualified drivers.
These enforcement efforts reflect growing concerns about how inadequate oversight during the pandemic years may have allowed safety standards to deteriorate across the industry. The trucking sector is critical to American commerce, with commercial vehicles transporting the vast majority of goods throughout the country, making safety lapses particularly consequential for public welfare.
The Department of Transportation shut down hundreds of trucking schools that put non-English-speaking drivers on the roads. Some of the schools failed to provide adequate space for drivers to take driving tests, had unlicensed instructors, and often lacked classrooms, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said at a press conference last month.
The Department of Transportation has taken more than 28,000 drivers out of service in the last year and a half for failing to meet English-proficiency requirements. The department has also forced states to cancel more than 30,000 foreign drivers’ licenses.
The scale of these enforcement actions suggests that compliance issues in the trucking industry extended far beyond isolated incidents. The combination of reinstated in-person inspections and stricter licensing requirements signals a comprehensive approach to restoring pre-pandemic safety standards that critics say were compromised by years of remote oversight.
