A driver who got a language violation in March of last year drove away with paperwork. A driver stopped for the same thing in August got walked to the shoulder and parked. Between those two traffic stops, not one word of 49 C F R 391.11(b)(2) changed — the requirement that a driver read and speak English well enough to converse with the public, understand highway signs, respond to official inquiries and make entries on records has been in the qualification rules, in some form, since the Interstate Commerce Commission wrote it in 1937. What changed is where enforcement lives: an executive order in the spring of 2025, an F M C S A policy memo that May, and C V S A adding the violation to its North American Standard Out-of-Service Criteria effective June 25, 2025.
Between January 2025 and June 24, 2025, 7,812 ELP violations were issued across the United States, with 33 of those resulting in OOS orders. … Between June 25, 2025 and March 19, 2026, there were 60,399 ELP violations issued, with 19,045 of those resulting in OOS orders.
out-of-service orders, before and after the June 25, 2025 tolerance change — the regulation's text identical on both sides
Six months of the old tolerance against nine months of the new one, from the proposal's own enforcement data.
Monday's rulemaking does two things, and the second one is the news. First, it codifies current practice: 391.11(b)(2) joins the out-of-service definition in 390.5T, and a new paragraph says a driver in violation “must be placed out of service immediately.” On most U.S. highways that changes nothing you'd see from the cab — it is already happening under the C V S A criteria. Second, it reaches where the criteria today do not: the U.S.–Mexico border commercial zones, where 44,354 of last year's violations produced zero out-of-service orders. Under the proposal, a border-zone stop becomes a parked truck whenever the trip continues past the zone. F M C S A ran the origin-and-destination data and estimates about 9,000 drivers a year would be placed out of service under that test — and, unusually, the agency says out loud that its method is a proxy and asks for comment on whether it under- or overestimates.
My read: codifying is the honest move, whatever you think of the policy. Enforcement that lives in a memo arrived without notice-and-comment and can leave the same way. A rule is at least a thing you can see coming — and, until October 9, a thing you can argue with.
The 19,045 orders all occurred outside border commercial zones; the zones are exactly where the proposal changes the outcome.
Three moves before the window closes. Cross-border operations: model the zone rule now — if a driver's trip leaves the commercial zone, a violation becomes a parked truck plus a stranded load, and dray-to-linehaul handoffs at the zone edge start looking like a compliance feature rather than an inefficiency. Comment on the math — F M C S A is explicitly asking whether its origin-and-destination proxy over- or undercounts the 9,000; carriers with actual border-zone dispatch data are the only ones who can answer that. Audit driver-qualification files — the requirement is a qualification, so the roadside stop is only the second place a carrier is exposed; the D Q file was the first.
Kept honest. This is a proposal, not a final rule — and outside the border zones it mostly ratifies what roadside enforcement has been doing since June 2025, so nothing about tomorrow's inspection changes because of Monday's document. The 9,000 is the agency's own estimate built on a proxy it concedes is indirect, and violation counts are not distinct-driver counts. The out-of-service orders and violations quoted are enforcement events under the C V S A criteria and the 2025 policy memos, not case outcomes — a violation can be contested. And nothing in the proposal changes the underlying qualification standard itself: the words a driver has to meet are the same ones from 1937.
Sources, all primary, fetched today, August 14, 2026. (1) F M C S A, English Language Proficiency; Out of Service Criteria, notice of proposed rulemaking, 91 F R 51422, F R Doc. 2026-16288, RIN 2126-AC99, published August 10, 2026, comments due October 9, 2026 — read in full from the govinfo PDF, 2026-16288.pdf (the Federal Register HTML and raw-text routes are bot-walled; the govinfo PDF is the same document). Source of: the enforcement counts quoted verbatim (7,812 violations / 33 O O S orders, January 2025 through June 24, 2025; 60,399 violations / 19,045 O O S orders, June 25, 2025 through March 19, 2026); the fact that all 19,045 occurred outside border commercial zones while 44,354 border-zone violations drew no O O S orders; the proposed additions to 390.5T and the new 391.11(c) “must be placed out of service immediately”; the border-zone trip test and the agency's 83.5 / 16 percent origin-and-destination analysis projecting roughly 56,575 border-zone violations and about 9,000 O O S orders a year, with F M C S A's request for comment on that methodology; the 1937 I C C origin (1 M.C.C. 1, published at 2 F R 144, January 22, 1937) including the “ability to read and speak the English language” qualification text; the current 391.11(b)(2) standard; C V S A's June 25, 2025 out-of-service criteria change, the May 2025 policy memo, the April 2026 policy memo, E O 14286, and C V S A's October 25, 2025 petition this rulemaking grants. The “33 in six months to 19,045 in nine” framing is my arithmetic on the quoted periods. No trade press supplied any fact in this edition.
There's a sentence about speaking English that's been in the federal driver qualification rules since 1937. Last year, out-of-service orders under it went from 33 in six months to 19,045 in nine. Not one word of the regulation changed. What changed is an enforcement tolerance — an executive order, a policy memo, and CVSA adding the violation to its out-of-service criteria in June 2025. Same sentence, different consequences: the March driver got paperwork, the August driver got parked. Monday, FMCSA proposed writing that tolerance into the rulebook itself. Outside the border zones, that changes almost nothing — it's already how roadside works. The actual news is INSIDE the U.S.-Mexico border commercial zones, where 44,354 of last year's violations produced exactly zero out-of-service orders. Under the proposal, a border-zone violation parks the truck whenever the trip continues past the zone. FMCSA's own estimate: about 9,000 drivers a year. And here's the part I want cross-border operators to hear: the agency admits its 9,000 figure rests on a proxy — cargo origin and destination standing in for where the driver was actually headed — and it is explicitly asking for comment on whether that math over- or undercounts. That's rare. That's an open door. Carriers with real border-zone dispatch data are the only people who can walk through it, and it closes October 9. My take: codifying is the honest move whatever you think of the policy. Enforcement that lives in a memo arrived without comment and can leave the same way. A rule you can comment on is at least a rule you can see coming. If you run cross-border freight: model the zone-edge handoff now, and put your dispatch data into the docket before October 9.
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FIRST SOURCE · one verified original-source finding, composed for one reader · this edition: trucking — written for the people whose audience is about to find out where a sentence from 1937 got its teeth