C.H. Robinson is on Capitol Hill asking Congress to define what reasonable carrier vetting looks like. Nine justices already said the question belongs to juries. That’s the problem.

Caribe Transport II held a conditional safety rating when C.H. Robinson tendered it a load of plastic pots. Conditional isn’t a secret. It sits on a public federal website, next to the driver qualification, hours-of-service, and vehicle maintenance deficiencies that produced it. Driver Yosniel Varela-Mojena was moving that load through Illinois when his truck struck Shawn Montgomery’s tractor-trailer. Montgomery lost his leg. He sued C.H. Robinson, alleging the broker knew, or should have known, that Caribe Transport’s record made it an unreasonable choice. The district court dismissed the claim. The Seventh Circuit affirmed it. On May 14, 2026, nine justices reversed both of them, and every argument the industry had made about federal preemption ended that morning.

That is not a surprise ruling in isolation. It resolved a circuit split that had festered for six years, and the industry knew it was coming. Nobody agreed on which side would win. The Ninth Circuit had said in Miller v. C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. in 2020 that state negligent-hiring claims against brokers survive federal preemption. The Seventh and Eleventh Circuits said the opposite, tossing those claims on FAAAA grounds in Ye v. GlobalTranz Enterprises, Inc. and Aspen American Insurance Co. v. Landstar Ranger, both in 2023. The Sixth Circuit weighed in on the Ninth’s side in 2025. The Supreme Court took the case in October 2025, heard oral argument on March 4, 2026, and decided it on May 14. Justice Barrett wrote for a unanimous Court. Justice Kavanaugh concurred separately, noting that brokers who exercise reasonable care and document their carrier selections should be able to defend against these suits. He also stressed the ruling shouldn’t be read as opening brokers to routine liability. That concurrence is the only comfort the industry got, and it isn’t a standard. It’s a suggestion.

The statutory text at issue is 49 U.S.C. § 14501(c). Congress enacted it in 1994 as part of the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act, to deregulate trucking and eliminate the state-law patchwork strangling interstate commerce. The statute broadly preempts any state law related to the prices, routes, or services of motor carriers or brokers. That’s the preemption clause, § 14501(c)(1). Right next to it sits § 14501(c)(2)(A), the safety exception: the FAAAA does not restrict a state’s safety regulatory authority with respect to motor vehicles. The whole six-year fight was about nine words. The Seventh and Eleventh Circuits read those nine words narrowly, concluding that broker conduct in selecting a carrier was too far removed from actual motor vehicle operation to qualify. The Supreme Court read them as they say. A claim that one company negligently hired another to transport goods concerns motor vehicles. The safety exception applies. The preemption defense is gone.

Four days after the decision, the Fourth Circuit vacated a freight broker’s summary judgment in Fuelling v. Echo Global Logistics, Inc., No. 25-1217, and sent it back for further proceedings. Angela Fuelling had brought that case as personal representative of the estate of James Fuelling, who was killed in a crash involving a truck Echo Global booked. The district court in South Carolina had granted Echo Global’s motion on preemption grounds. The Fourth Circuit had held the appeal in abeyance while Montgomery was decided. It didn’t wait long once Montgomery came down. That’s how fast this is moving through the dockets, and that’s before most of the industry has finished reading the opinion.

C.H. Robinson CEO Dave Bozeman was in Washington this week meeting with lawmakers from both parties, arguing that the ruling creates compliance chaos the market can’t solve on its own. His core argument is that the Court removed the preemption shield without replacing it with a workable standard. Every state can now apply its own negligence law to broker carrier-selection decisions, which means a broker tendering a load that crosses state lines may face different standards of care depending on where the truck is when it crashes. That’s the patchwork Congress was trying to eliminate in 1994, reassembled under tort law rather than regulation. Bozeman described it to Transport Topics as a commerce issue, not a C.H. Robinson issue, and he’s not wrong to frame it that way, though his company is also the named defendant in the case that produced the ruling, which adds a particular texture to his standing in the room.

The legislative ask is H.R. 5337, the Motor Carrier Safety Selection Standard Act of 2024, introduced by Rep. Pete Stauber (MN-08). The bill would require brokers and shippers to verify, within 45 days before a shipment, that the motor carrier they’re hiring is registered under 49 U.S.C. § 13902, holds the minimum required insurance, and hasn’t been found unfit or ordered to discontinue operations by FMCSA. Meet those three checks, and you’re considered reasonable and prudent. That’s the statutory safe harbor the bill creates. The Transportation Intermediaries Association is pushing for the bill’s inclusion in the reconciliation package and sent a letter to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee saying as much. The bill has been through several Congresses in various forms, introduced first in the 116th in 2020, reintroduced in the 117th and 118th, now carried into the 119th. It hasn’t passed yet.

The compliance problem the bill is trying to solve is real, and it predates Montgomery. FMCSA issues safety ratings: satisfactory, conditional, and unsatisfactory. Most carriers on the road have never been rated. Of those that have, a conditional rating means the agency found deficiencies but didn’t pull the authority. An unsatisfactory rating means the agency found the carrier unfit to operate. A broker who puts a conditionally rated carrier on one of their loads can now face a jury question about whether that was reasonable. A broker who puts a never-rated carrier on a load faces the same question with less information to defend itself. In Kavanaugh’s concurrence, the Court told the industry that documented, reasonable diligence should be a winning defense. But federal regulation doesn’t define reasonable diligence for broker-carrier selection, which is why C.H. Robinson and TIA are asking Congress to define it.

Bozeman told Transport Topics his company’s own research shows the number of small- to medium-sized brokers declined roughly 20% over the past two years under difficult market conditions. He estimates another 20% could be affected if Congress doesn’t establish legal clarity in the wake of Montgomery. That second figure is a projection, not a measurement, and it should be read as such. What isn’t a projection is the insurance pressure. Bozeman said he’s already seeing signs the ruling is affecting brokers’ ability to obtain coverage, and insurers repricing broker liability isn’t a hypothetical. It’s a straightforward actuarial response to a defense that no longer exists. Those costs move. They move into broker premiums, into load rates, and eventually into the consumer price of whatever is on the truck. Bozeman was direct about that transmission mechanism when he said the rises are transitory and ultimately reach consumer costs. He’s correct that they do, though the timeline and magnitude are genuinely unclear right now.

The FMCSA already evaluates whether carriers meet federal safety standards. The agency assigns safety ratings and runs the Safety Measurement System, which scores carriers across seven behavioral analysis categories including unsafe driving, hours of service, vehicle maintenance, and controlled substances. Those scores are public. The argument Bozeman is making on the Hill, and the one baked into H.R. 5337, is that a broker who relies on FMCSA’s own determinations to make a carrier selection should be insulated from a jury second-guessing that decision under state tort law. That’s a defensible position. It’s also worth saying plainly that FMCSA’s rating system has documented gaps: most carriers have never been comprehensively rated, SMS percentiles are a relative measure, not a fitness determination, and a satisfactory rating can be more than a decade old. A broker checking the box on a carrier with an eleven-year-old satisfactory rating and no recent inspections has done the minimum. Whether that minimum constitutes reasonable care under state negligence law is now a jury question in every state.

That gap between the statutory minimum and actual reasonable care is where every broker’s liability exposure now lives. The Motor Carrier Safety Selection Standard Act doesn’t close that gap so much as it draws a floor under it. A broker who hits the three verification checkpoints the bill requires is deemed reasonable and prudent. A broker who does more than the three checkpoints is presumably on even stronger ground. A broker who does less is exposed. That’s not a liability shield, as C.H. Robinson’s chief legal officer Dorothy Capers told FreightWaves when the bill was being pushed earlier this year. It sets a clear standard of responsibility. The difference matters because it determines what plaintiffs’ lawyers will argue about when these cases reach discovery, and these cases are going to reach discovery. The Fourth Circuit made sure of that four days after the ink dried on Montgomery.

If you’re a broker, your vetting records are your defense. Not the FMCSA search you ran once when you onboarded the carrier two years ago. The version you ran within 45 days of the load in question, the one that shows active authority, valid insurance, and no outstanding unfit determination. If that record doesn’t exist, you don’t have a defense. You have a conditional carrier, a load, and a jury. The bill hasn’t passed. The standard isn’t law yet. Until it is, state negligence law applies in every jurisdiction where your truck moves, and the standard of care is whatever a reasonable person in your position should have done. Go pull the record and document that you pulled it. That part doesn’t require an act of Congress.