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Duffy Signs the English Language Proficiency Enforcement Order in Austin, May 21, 2025

May 21, 2025 · US Department of Transportation · 0:27:56

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy held a press conference in Austin, Texas, in the Department of Transportation’s upload of the event, alongside the Texas Trucking Association’s president and CEO, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association’s president, and the chairman of the Texas Department of Transportation, as Duffy introduced them. Truckers, he said, are the backbone of America: three-quarters of the nation’s freight is moved by trucks and 12 million Americans are employed in the trucking industry, as he stated the figures.

The action announced was the English language proficiency reset: Duffy said he was officially rescinding the 2016 Obama-era guidance on English language proficiency and replacing it with stronger enforcement procedures, and he signed a secretarial order at the event directing the change, as the press conference carried it. Federal law, he said, has always required commercial drivers to be proficient in English; under the new guidance, a driver who cannot understand English will not drive a commercial vehicle in this country, with out-of-service enforcement restored, as he stated the policy. He grounded it in the violation record as he stated the figures: in 2015, before the guidance changed, there were over 99,000 English language proficiency violations and about 1,000 drivers taken out of service; by 2024 that had dropped to 10,000 violations and zero taken out of service. The department also announced a review of commercial driver’s license security procedures state by state, a review of non-domiciled CDLs, and improved verification protocols for domestic and international credentials, as he stated the accompanying actions.

Why it matters

Austin is where the English-proficiency campaign began — the rescinded 2016 guidance, the restored out-of-service standard, and the CDL security reviews all date from this signing — three months before the August 26 enforcement action against California, Washington, and New Mexico paged on this site applied the same policy to named states.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard candidate: the secretarial order signed in Austin rescinding the 2016 English language proficiency guidance and restoring out-of-service enforcement, as announced by Secretary Duffy. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of Transportation, “Secretary Duffy holds Press Conference in Austin, TX” (official upload, embedded above). Remarks and figures as delivered by Secretary Duffy at the press conference.