The SAFE Act would require FMCSA to build an automated screen that catches reincarnated carriers before they get a new DOT number. The agency has been trying to do exactly that, with what it had, since 2012. We’ve done this twice with paid for systems like Archi and Ursa. The question is whether this bill gives it what it didn’t have before.

On July 28, Sens. Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Andy Kim (D-N.J.) introduced S. 5150, the Safety and Accountability in Freight Enforcement Act, directing FMCSA to plan, develop, and test an advanced automation tool that flags DOT number applications sharing attributes with previously sanctioned carriers. FMCSA’s own research page describes a project with that exact goal: the Utility for Risk-based Screening and Assessment, or URSA, built “to develop a risk-based algorithm for screening all applications for a U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) number.” Contract awarded January 2015. Prototype implemented September 2015. Integrated into the Unified Registration System in March 2016. Funded at $487,045 in fiscal 2015 and $492,814 in fiscal 2016, built by Integrated Technology Solutions, Inc. Current status, as posted by the agency: Complete.

The scheme URSA was built to catch hasn’t changed. A carrier accumulates safety problems, an out-of-service order, a conditional rating after a compliance review, a fatality, or just the awareness that a federal investigation is coming. The authority gets revoked or lapses. An officer forms a new LLC, sometimes recycling a word from the old name, and applies for authority under a fresh USDOT number. Same trucks, same people, sometimes the same VINs on the new filing, different paper. That’s authority reincarnation, and FMCSA’s regulatory text at 49 CFR Part 385, Subpart D, sections 385.901 through 385.919, calls the operator a reincarnated carrier. The industry says chameleon carrier, a term Central Analysis Bureau coined and trademarked more than a decade ago.

Congress first tried to close this in SAFETEA-LU, the 2005 highway bill, authorizing the Secretary to withhold, suspend, amend, or revoke registration on a finding of a pattern or practice of avoiding compliance or masking noncompliance. The 2008 crashes are what moved it from a paragraph in a statute to a program with a budget line. A bus operated by a carrier with a documented violation history crashed near Sherman, Texas, killing 17 people on a church trip. Virginia state trooper Kelly Linhart was struck and killed during a roadside inspection that same year. In 2012 the Government Accountability Office published “New Applicant Reviews Should Expand to Identify Freight Carriers Evading Detection,” which counted 1,136 applicants with chameleon attributes in 2010, up from 759 in 2005, and found 18 percent of them later involved in severe crashes against 6 percent of new applicants without those attributes. Congress put $3.5 million behind it. By June 2013 FMCSA reported back with ARCHI, the Application Review and Chameleon Investigation system, scoring applications on shared names, addresses, EINs, officers, vehicles, and business relationships, with anything at 1.5 or above kicked to motive screening.

ARCHI covered the applicants FMCSA’s Vetting Team already had authority to examine, passenger carriers and household goods movers, roughly 2 percent of new applicants at the time. Freight, the other 98 percent, went through a process that checked whether the business entity legally existed and whether the paperwork was in order. GAO came back in its 2014 CSA review, GAO-14-114, and told the agency to risk-screen every applicant rather than 2 percent of them. That recommendation is what produced URSA. The Small Business Innovation Research Phase I study concluded in August 2014, the contract landed in January 2015, and by March 2016 the tool was feeding a risk score into URS-1 on the likelihood that an applicant “was a chameleon carrier, was attempting to reincarnate, or was attempting otherwise to receive authority illicitly.” In July 2016 FMCSA told reporters it had screened 100 percent of operating authority applications for reincarnated carriers.

Then the gates opened. URS rolled out in phases, and only the first one ever happened. The phase effective December 12, 2015 covered first-time applicants seeking a new USDOT number and, where applicable, operating authority. Every subsequent phase, the one that would have moved existing registrants onto the same system, slipped from September 30, 2016 to January 14, 2017 and then off the calendar entirely. On January 17, 2017, FMCSA published “Unified Registration System; Suspension of Effectiveness” at 82 FR 5292, docket FMCSA-1997-2349, suspending the requirement indefinitely and reinstating temporary regulations that read almost exactly like the rules in place the day before. Existing carriers went back to paper. The MCS-150 biennial update, the name change, the business-form change, the transfer of authority, the reinstatement after revocation, all of it stayed on the OP-1 series and the MCS-150 for the next nine years.

A screen on the front door and a paper form on the side door isn’t a screen. The reincarnation that URSA was designed to catch happens at first application, and plenty of it happens afterward, in the officer change filed on an MCS-150, in the name change to a company that already holds authority, in the reinstatement of a dormant number. A carrier does not need a new USDOT number to become a different company on paper. It needs an update nobody scores.

Look at what came through the door while that side door sat open. FMCSA registration statistics put active carriers at roughly 602,500 in 2019 and 813,844 in 2022. FTR counted about 59,000 new for-hire authorities granted in calendar 2020, a record at the time, and 2021 ran past it. The freight recession took some of that back, with the count falling to 787,189 in 2023 and roughly 10,000 more exiting in the first half of 2024, and then in the first quarter of 2026 grants and reinstatements outran revocations again for the first time since Q2 2025, with revocations at their lowest quarterly level since Q4 2021. Motus will identity-proof roughly 800,000 existing registrants when they first log in, which is FMCSA’s own count of who is currently on its books.

Most of those carriers are not chameleons. That distinction is where the honest work is, and it’s the part the endorsement statements skip. Shared identifiers are a starting point for review, not a finding. A registered agent’s address sits on thousands of filings. A holding company with six operating LLCs shares officers, phones, and a yard by design. A fleet that buys another fleet inherits its VINs, its drivers, and sometimes its terminal. Every one of those looks, on a first pass, like the operator who revoked a number in March and applied for a new one in April. The working standard on my side of this is two distinct identifiers before I’ll link two entities in print, and it exists because the one-identifier version generates accusations against people running legitimate businesses.

The far end of that spectrum leaves nothing to the imagination. Rep. Harriet Hageman, who introduced the House version, H.R. 7539, on February 12, described the network behind a February crash in Indiana that killed four people in a van: 139 trucks shared across different DOT numbers, 91 crashes, and miles reported after authorities had revoked the operating permits. Reporting mileage on a revoked authority is not a data-entry error. It’s a company telling the federal government how much work it did during a period when it was not permitted to do any.

What’s actually different in 2026 is Motus. On April 29 FMCSA published a notice of policy at 91 FR 23144, signed by Administrator Derek Barrs, announcing the registration system that replaces URS and the FMCSA Portal and finally answers the statutory mandate at 49 U.S.C. 13908. Phase I opened December 8, 2025 to supporting companies, the BOC-3 filers, the insurance and surety filers, the service providers. Phase II opens it to everyone. The agency contracted IDEMIA in April 2025 for identity document capture and verification, so every new applicant scans a government ID and their own face before the application proceeds. In September 2025 it contracted CLEAR for business verification, confirming legal name, principal place of business, ownership structure, and company officials against the state of record. FMCSA puts the annual volume of registration transactions requiring business verification at about 5.5 million. Item 11 on the Phase II list is the biennial update, which drags the side door into the same building as the front one for the first time since January 2017.

Motus is also where the pattern is already repeating, in the same notice. Stakeholders pushed back in listening sessions on three things, and FMCSA pulled all three out of Phase II: safety registration, the elimination of MC and FF docket numbers, and changes to the BOC-3 filing process. The agency says it will take a measured approach and implement them in later releases. That is the identical sentence structure that produced the 2016 delays, and later releases is how URS phase two was described in September 2016.

The rest of the enforcement posture is real, and it’s why this Congress may get further than the last three did. Secretary Sean Duffy announced regulatory proposals in February aimed at chameleon carriers, including identity verification and revised suspension and revocation procedures for noncompliant carriers and training schools. On September 4, Reps. Dave Taylor (R-Ohio) and Shomari Figures (D-Ala.), the founding co-chairs of the Congressional Trucking Caucus, introduced the REVOKE Act, which would rewrite the registration text so that only an employer or person with an active USDOT number may operate a commercial motor vehicle in interstate commerce. The SAFE Act carries 19 House cosponsors, was referred to the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit on February 13, and was adopted by voice vote as an amendment to the Build America 250 Act, the House surface transportation reauthorization. ATA, the Truckload Carriers Association, National Tank Truck Carriers, the Indiana Motor Truck Association, OOIDA, and the Teamsters have all endorsed it. Young chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Surface Transportation, Freight, Pipelines and Safety; Kim sits on it. Hageman and Julia Brownley (D-Calif.) have carried it in the House with Ranking Member Rick Larsen (D-Wash.), who co-wrote the reauthorization, advocating for the amendment in committee.

The support for that posture has an asterisk on it. In March I documented, in two parts for FreightWaves, how Dragos Sprinceana operated DMG Consulting & Development, Inc., USDOT 2190975, under the trade name GoldCoast Logistics, accumulating 150 crashes, 10 fatalities, and 86 injuries in federal records, leaving $889,630 in federal fines unpaid, drawing two out-of-service orders, and listing a dead man as the company’s registered agent in Illinois corporate filings. Public records and social media archives place him at a private fundraiser with Matt Gaetz, then a sitting member of Congress, and at an “American Patriots” event, during the period FMCSA was pursuing enforcement against the company. I said then that I wasn’t alleging impropriety by anyone he stood next to, and I’m not alleging it now. DMG’s authority was cancelled and the out-of-service order held. Chheanrem Chhean, the GoldCoast driver his family called Rocky, lost control on Interstate 81 in Shenandoah County, Virginia on October 8, 2019 and died at the scene at 45 years old. As of March 11, 2026, no workers’ compensation death claim had ever been filed for him under the company’s policy.

The reason to want the GAO study in this bill more than the automation tool is clear: nobody can tell you today how big this is. The last federal count is 1,136 applicants in 2010, from a report published in 2012 about a market that has since added and shed a couple hundred thousand carriers, moved to random seven-digit DOT numbers above 4.6 million as of May 17, and started issuing authority to applicants whose faces have been matched to a government ID. An Inspector General audit two years after the screening tool is implemented is the other provision worth watching, because it’s the one that will say whether the new tool detects freight-carrier reincarnation at a materially better rate than the tool the agency finished in March 2016 and posted as complete.

None of that changes what’s on your desk this week. Pull the SAFER snapshot on any carrier you’re considering. If a Reincarnated Carrier flag is on it, FMCSA enforcement staff has already documented the connection to a prior entity with history, and the tender stops there until you’ve called the carrier, asked what the prior entity was and what changed operationally, and written down the answer and your conclusion. Since Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, that file is what a jury reads when it decides whether your diligence was reasonable. The SAFE Act, if it passes and if FMCSA builds what it promises, moves the screen to the registration counter. URSA was supposed to do that in March 2016.