Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued a directive Tuesday ordering commercial truck drivers to be fluent in English or else risk losing their jobs.
Under the new guidance from the Transportation Department, truck drivers who fail to meet the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s English language proficiency standards will be taken off the roads.
“We are issuing guidance that ensures a driver who cannot understand English will not drive a vehicle in this country,” Duffy said during a news conference in Austin, Texas. “For too long, misguided policies have prioritized political correctness over the safety of the American people.”
“There’s numerous examples across the country where we’ve had people who are operating this kind of equipment who can’t speak the language,” he continued. “And the results have been devastating and have taken the lives of so many American families. That’s going to end right now.”
Duffy’s announcement follows through on an executive order signed by President Donald Trump last month that argued all truck drivers “should be able to read and understand traffic signs, communicate with traffic safety officers, border patrol, agricultural checkpoints, and cargo weight-limit station personnel, and provide and receive feedback and directions in English.”
The DOT’s latest policy returns the country to guidance followed prior to the Obama years. Under former President Barack Obama, the DOT relaxed the penalty for failing to meet English-speaking standards from taking drivers off the road to being issued a citation.
Duffy argued that Obama’s penalty reversal posed a danger to transportation safety, concerns that have been echoed by the American Trucking Association, the largest national trade association for the trucking industry in the United States.
“’America First’ means safety first,” Duffy said. “Americans are a lot safer on roads alongside truckers who can understand and interpret our traffic signs. This commonsense change ensures the penalty for failure to comply is more than a slap on the wrist.”
DUFFY ‘CONCERNED’ ABOUT ‘WHOLE AIRSPACE’ IN WAKE OF NEWARK AIRPORT DISRUPTIONS
Since he took office in late January, Duffy has faced growing concerns that the U.S.’s transportation infrastructure is in desperate need of modernization. Those worries have been exhibited most prominently through a series of critical outages at Newark Liberty International Airport, problems Duffy says will be faced by airports across the country.
Duffy led the Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday in announcing that Newark will reduce the flight arrival and departure rate at the airport. Earlier this month, he unveiled a sweeping plan seeking to modernize the air traffic control system that hopes to address problems faced by airports such as Newark and other incidents, including a January midair collision in Washington that killed 67 people.
