On May 17, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Sam Graves, R-Mo., and ranking member Rick Larsen, D-Wash., released the BUILD America 250 Act, a bipartisan five-year surface transportation reauthorization that has to clear Congress before the current law expires Sept. 30. It is a big bill, more than 1,000 pages, and the press release sells the big numbers. More than $50 billion for bridges, the largest bridge investment in the nation’s history. A first-ever federal framework for autonomous trucks. A new annual registration fee on electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, pitched as the first new money for the Highway Trust Fund in more than three decades.
Those are the headlines. If you broker freight, run a fleet, or write insurance for either one, the provisions that are going to change how you operate are not in the headlines. They are in Title V, the motor carrier title, and three of them deserve your attention right now. Broker qualifications. DataQs reform. And hair testing. None of the three flips a switch the day the bill is signed. All three change the ground you are standing on.
DataQs reform and your insurance renewal
Start with DataQs because it has the most immediate dollars attached to it. Section 5203 does two things that matter. First, during any period that a safety violation is being contested, the bill requires that violation to be labeled as contested in the Motor Carrier Management Information System and in the other databases that feed off it, including the Pre-Employment Screening Program, the Safety Measurement System and Analysis and Information Online, until the review is finished. Second, it requires that an appeal of a DataQs decision be decided by a person other than the person who issued the violation.
If you have ever fought a roadside inspection violation or a non-preventable crash, you know why both of those matter. Right now, when you challenge something, the clock keeps running against you while you wait. The violation appears in your SMS percentiles and crash record, visible to anyone who pulls your profile, with no indication that you are disputing it. And the challenge is often reviewed by the same state agency, sometimes the same office, that wrote it up in the first place. The bill does not promise you will win. It promises the dispute is visible and the review is neutral.
That is an insurance story and not just a compliance story. Your crash record and your CSA scores are not abstractions. They are line items in how an underwriter prices your policy and decides whether to renew you at all. A carrier with a crash on its record that it never bothered to challenge is a carrier paying a higher premium for a crash that may not have been its fault. If you are not already reviewing every crash and every violation on your record and fighting the ones you can, you are leaving money on the table at renewal, and in this market, nobody can afford to do that. What this provision should do is make that fight cleaner and more worth your time, because a contested item will finally look contested when your broker or insurer pulls the file. The catch, and there is always a catch, is that the Secretary has a year after enactment to write the participation guidelines, and a year is a year.
Broker qualifications and the liability gap
The second provision is broker qualifications, and this one is going to force a conversation the industry has been avoiding. Section 5006 orders the U.S. Department of Transportation to issue a final rule within 2 years that actually implements the experience and qualification requirements for officers of brokers and freight forwarders. Those requirements have technically been sitting in the statute, in sections 13903 and 13904 of title 49, and they have never been turned into an enforced rule. The bill also requires DOT to brief Congress every six months until the rule is completed, which is Congress’s way of saying it is tired of waiting.
To understand why this matters, consider what it takes to become a broker today versus a motor carrier. A motor carrier hauling general freight has to carry at least $750,000 in liability coverage, and more for certain commodities. A broker has to post a $75,000 surety bond and clear a registration process with very little real vetting. There is no enforced experience requirement and no minimum liability insurance requirement worth the name. For years, that was defensible because the legal theory was that a broker arranges freight and does not touch the truck, so the broker does not carry the truck’s exposure.
That theory is eroding in real time. Courts around the country are increasingly letting negligent selection claims against brokers go to juries, and a broker that loses one of those can be tagged with a verdict the size of anything a motor carrier would face. So the industry is walking into an asymmetry. A broker can now be held nearly as liable as a carrier while carrying none of the carrier’s baseline regulatory floor. No experience bar. No real minimum coverage. The BUILD America 250 Act starts to close one half of that gap, the qualifications half. It does not touch the other half.
That leaves the open question, which brokers and the people who insure them should be asking now. Where do broker insurance requirements go from here? If a broker is exposed to a nuclear verdict, a $75,000 bond is not protection; it is a rounding error. My read is that the market will answer this question before the regulators do. Expect contingent cargo coverage and broker liability coverage to move from optional to effectively mandatory, not because a rule says so, but because shippers and the larger brokers are going to start demanding proof of real coverage in their contracts. You can expect the next regulatory fight after this one to be over a genuine minimum broker liability insurance requirement. Qualifying brokers is step one. Capitalizing them to match their new exposure is the step nobody has legislated yet.
Hair testing and the capacity squeeze
The third provision is hair testing, and this is the one where the headline and the fine print do not match, so read the fine print. Section 5206 does not authorize hair testing. What it does is set a one-year clock for DOT to revise Part 40, the federal drug and alcohol testing rule, to recognize hair as an approved specimen. That clock does not start until the Department of Health and Human Services finally issues its scientific and technical guidelines for hair testing.
That is the whole ballgame, and it is worth knowing the history. Congress first ordered HHS to develop hair-testing guidelines in the 2015 FAST Act. It ordered them again in 2018. HHS still has not delivered a final version. The 2020 attempt was returned as a proposal rather than a final rule. So Section 5206 is not Congress creating hair testing. It is Congress trying, once more, to force a decade-old logjam, while the actual trigger sits on a desk at HHS.
When that trigger does get pulled, it changes the math for every fleet. Here is what I mean. The reason large carriers like J.B. Hunt and Knight-Swift already run hair tests alongside the required urine test is that hair catches users that urine does not. I ran my own small comparison, urine and hair on the same drivers on the same day. Out of 17 who passed the urine test, seven failed the hair test. That is not a rounding error. That is a 41 percent miss rate on the federally required method, caught by a method the federal program does not yet recognize.
Now connect that to capacity. The FMCSA Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse already had more than 190,000 drivers sitting in prohibited status as of mid-2025, and roughly 148,000 of them had never even started the return-to-duty process that would let them drive again. That is the picture under urine testing alone. If hair testing becomes the federal standard and those results start feeding the Clearinghouse, the catch rate goes up, and a meaningful number of drivers who are passing today move into prohibited status. There is no way around that arithmetic. Better testing means a smaller and cleaner pool of qualified drivers at the same time.
For a fleet that cuts both ways, and you should plan for both. It is an asset because you stop being the carrier who unknowingly hires the driver who failed a hair test somewhere else and walks. It is a pressure point, because your applicant pool shrinks, and because a post-crash hair test you chose not to run can become a plaintiff’s exhibit in exactly the kind of negligence case that is already getting harder to defend. It is also fair to say this is contested ground. The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association has long opposed a hair mandate over the marijuana detection window, false positive risk and driver due process, and there are unresolved religious and disparate impact objections that HHS has been chewing on for years. Those concerns are real, and they are part of why this has taken a decade. But the direction of travel is no longer really in doubt.
Put the three together and they are the same story told three ways. All three are listed under the motor carrier title. All three are about accountability and the data trail behind a carrier, a broker and a driver. All three are slow fuses, a rulemaking here, a contingent clock there, nothing that lands the day the President signs. That is exactly why the mistake would be to wait for the final rules before you react. The brokers and fleets that come out ahead from this are the ones that start now. Challenge every violation and crash on your record. Audit your broker coverage against the liability you are actually carrying, not the liability you carried five years ago. Build your hiring and your budget around the assumption that hair testing is coming.
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