So why does the narrative persist? The answer is leverage. The shortage narrative gives national trade associations and their lobbyists cover to push shortcuts that do not address retention. The most visible shortcut in Washington is immigration. For decades the American Trucking Associations has used shortage claims to argue that expanding visa programs is a solution to supposed labor gaps (PrePass Alliance). That messaging comes from national organizations and their advocates in the capital, not from small or mid sized fleets that are busy surviving volatile market cycles.
The Immigration Shortcut
Visa programs exist to fill real labor gaps. H-2B, E-2, and EB-3 visas make sense in industries where domestic workers are not available, such as seasonal agriculture or specific hospitality roles. In trucking the call for visas is rarely about a genuine shortage. It is often about avoiding reform of the job itself.
Instead of paying drivers for all of their time, fixing unpaid detention, unpredictable miles, or harsh long haul schedules, they point to Washington and say the answer is more visas. In reality, the numbers are small. In 2025, when Marco Rubio announced a pause on visas for commercial drivers, the pool involved was just under 1,500 annually out of a workforce of about 3.5 million drivers (Axios, 2025). That is a rounding error. Yet the rhetoric around visas is presented like an existential fix.
The visa pause did not shut down a critical pipeline. It revealed how out of step the shortage talk is with market reality. The United States does not need more drivers. It needs better jobs and better training.
Why the Job Pushes People Out
The industry does not struggle because of a shortage of people; it struggles because the job itself drives people away. Unpaid time at docks eats hours without compensation. Miles-based pay makes half a driver’s day invisible on a paycheck. Long haul schedules erode family life, disrupt sleep cycles, and degrade health. Benefits are thin at many fleets, and respect from management is often thinner than the margins.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics wrote in 2019 that the truck driver labor market functions like any other competitive market. Pay and conditions explain why people leave. There is no evidence of a mysterious missing pool of workers who cannot be found at any price (BLS, 2019). Retention is the problem: drivers come in, get licensed, and leave when promises do not match reality. Fleets replace them again and again. Lobbyists call this shortage; anyone looking honestly calls it churn.
Examples are everywhere. A new driver might spend three unpaid hours waiting at a shipper, then sit for another hour at a receiver, then discover that the layover does not qualify for detention pay under the carrier’s policy. The day looks full on a logbook, but empty on a paycheck. Another driver may chase promised miles, only to find that seasonal volume swings wipe out earnings for weeks. After a few months of that reality, people choose local work, switch industries, or exit transportation altogether. The result is not a shortage. It is the natural response to a compensation model that does not value time.
Retention improves when the job is designed to respect time. Paid detention turns waiting into earnings rather than loss. Guaranteed weekly minimums smooth out volatility in miles. Predictable home time reduces burnout. Clear, enforced safety policies reduce pressure to run illegal or skip rest. Transparent pay plans that compensate for non driving tasks align incentives with safety and service. None of these changes are mysterious. They are straightforward management choices that treat the driver’s time as the core product the industry sells.
How Fraud Thrives in the Myth
Instability is where fraud thrives. Fraudsters love a marketplace in turmoil and a workforce too destabilized to push back; they need companies that are too busy filling seats to ask hard questions. The shortage narrative helps create that desperation: if carriers think they cannot survive without new drivers, standards drop. Fake carriers slip in with false registrations and mailbox offices. Brokers skip vetting and release freight to unknown entities. Drivers with forged CDLs or stolen identities get behind the wheel. Fraud multiplies when survival is framed as a numbers game.
Fraud also evolves with opportunity. Double brokering schemes steal identities, steal rate confirmations, and re-assign loads through layers of shell entities, until the freight disappears or the liability is untraceable. Identity theft targets both carriers and drivers, exploiting gaps in verification on load boards and in back-office processes. When the market is told to prioritize speed over scrutiny because of a supposed shortage, bad actors flourish. The damage shows up as unpaid claims, cargo theft, missed appointments, and reputational harm for everyone who touched the load.
The response begins with insisting on identity that can be verified. That means carrier vetting tied to real people, verifiable tax records, and traceable physical operations. It means refusing to move freight with anyone whose story changes under basic due diligence. It means shrinking the window between onboarding and oversight so ghost companies cannot harvest freight and vanish. It also means pushing technology providers to make authentication, document validation, and event traceability default features, rather than optional add-ons.
Training: The Missing Foundation
One of the least discussed reasons the shortage myth survives is weak training. The United States does not lack people earning CDLs. It lacks preparation.
Entry Level Driver Training rules were meant to standardize a baseline. In practice, quality is uneven. Some schools teach professionalism, critical thinking in traffic, and real-world trip planning. Others operate as CDL mills that focus on passing the test rather than mastering the craft. The difference shows up immediately on the road. Undertrained drivers struggle with hours of service management, backing in tight urban docks, winter driving, trip time estimation, map reading, and defensive driving in mixed traffic. When drivers are thrown into those realities without a solid foundation, they burn out faster, make more mistakes, and leave earlier. That is not a shortage. That is a predictable fallout from poor preparation.
Groups like The Coalition for CDL Training, led by John Larrauri, are pressing for reform. Larrauri argues the issue is not quantity but raising the floor for skill. Strong training emphasizes time management, thorough pre-trip and post trip inspections, situational awareness in city and mountain corridors, and honest expectations about life on the road. That approach improves safety, cuts turnover, and reduces opportunities for exploitation. A trained driver is harder to manipulate, more confident in refusing unsafe runs, and more likely to remain in the industry for the long term.
Industry veteran John Carpenter has delivered the same warning in talks and public commentary. Treating CDL issuance as a numbers game without quality behind it does more harm than good. Each time a poorly prepared driver leaves in frustration or contributes to an avoidable incident, churn increases, insurance costs rise, and the shortage narrative gets recycled to excuse predictable attrition. Carpenter’s point is blunt, but accurate: the real shortage is in credible training, not in people.
Better training also blocks fraud. Weak standards allow paper drivers to emerge from fraudulent schools with documentation that looks legitimate but is not backed by competence. Strong standards expose those scams quickly because candidates cannot progress without demonstrating real skill. Training is not just a workforce issue. It is a fraud prevention issue because competence is the hardest thing to fake.
And this ties directly back to visas. When trade groups label every problem “shortage,” visas become the shortcut. Instead of fixing training pipelines, they look abroad. The visa pause sent a clear message. Until the industry proves it can train and retain the drivers it already has, importing more does nothing but extend churn.
Building Stability: Health and Identity in Trucking
Project 61 highlights a brutal fact: the average life expectancy of a U.S. truck driver is about 61 years (The Trucker). That number reflects grueling schedules, poor health support, poor sleep hygiene, and a job design that shortens lives. When drivers leave the industry early or never recover from chronic conditions, turnover and instability accelerate. Project 61 is about health, dignity, and longevity. The connection to fraud is indirect but real. Healthier drivers who stay longer create stability. Stability deprives opportunists of the chaos they exploit.
Project 61 also reframes accountability. Health outcomes are not personal failures; they are system outputs. If the system produces short careers and broken bodies, the system needs redesign. Nutrition access at truck stops, flexible parking, safe rest areas, paid waiting time that allows proper breaks, and support for preventive care are not fringe benefits. They are pillars of a workforce strategy that treats drivers as human beings rather than interchangeable parts.
What Comes Next
Stop recycling myths about shortages and call the problem what it is. Retention. Stop framing visas as the answer to an oversupplied market and address training and job design. Unpaid detention, miles only pay, and schedules that break people down have to change if trucking wants stability. Project 61 shows that driver health and longevity are not optional, and Dog Tags to DOT Numbers proves that accountability starts with identity.
There is no 80,000 driver shortage. What exists is a shortage of desirable jobs, consistent training, safety, and accountability. Fraud grows in those gaps. The longer the industry hides behind the shortage story, the deeper those gaps become.
This is not politics. This is accuracy. Drivers deserve jobs that pay and protect them. Shippers deserve a system that fraud cannot manipulate. The public deserves safe roads where every DOT number connects to a verified person.
The shortage narrative has been repeated for decades, but the facts have not changed. The United States produces more than enough drivers. The market is saturated. Wages and conditions, not headcount, explain why people leave. Fraud prevention and job reform, not visas and propaganda, are what will stabilize trucking.
The industry can either keep chasing ghosts or start building real trust again.