Check.
Unchecked? Blocking FMCSA’s insurance increase rulemaking and setting deadlines for an electronic logging device mandate and a Safety Fitness Determination rule.
Yes, trucking did indeed get the Congressional action it had asked for since July 2013 — a stay of enforcement on some of the more restrictive hours-of-service provisions in the 2013 HOS rule change, pending FMCSA study — in the 2015 “Cromnibus” appropriations bill cleared by Congress nearly two weeks ago and signed by the president last week.
And it’s a step that makes sense: The agency’s justification for the rule (which carriers and drivers have claimed is too restrictive, clogs up highways even further during rush hour and in fact makes drivers drowsier rather than more alert) has always been flimsy, and the science it used to back up the regulation was likewise questionable.
But harken back to just a few months ago, when Congress stood at the threshold of really flexing its muscle at the DOT’s trucking regulator.
In June, it seemed plausible that, in addition to the restart rollback, Congress could direct the agency to hustle on publishing the final rule mandating electronic logging devices and require it to produce a Safety Fitness Determination rule — now in the works for the better part of a decade — by this month, December 2014.
