The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration
Summary
FMCSA oversees roughly 800,000 active motor carriers and 7.2 million commercial driver's-license holders operating some 15 million large trucks and buses, and its Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse currently keeps 202,345 CDL holders off the road under a 'prohibited' status. Running the agency cost $1.04 billion in FY2026 enacted budget authority -- 52% of which is grants passed through to state and local partners who run the actual roadside inspections, not FMCSA's own operations -- and 1,151 federal employees, down from 1,230 the year before. The Clearinghouse itself, built under a rule mandated by the 2012 surface-transportation law, has logged 368,984 driver drug and alcohol violations nationwide since it opened in January 2020.
What is this organization?
What does it do?
oversees over 800,000 active motor carriers and roughly 7.2 million commercial driver's-license (CDL) holders operating some 15 million large trucks and buses. It does not run most enforcement itself -- its grants fund state and local partners who conduct the majority of CMV safety enforcement activities, including millions of inspections and thousands of audits annually, specifically compliance reviews, roadside inspections, and new-entrant safety audits. Its own Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse has logged 368,984 driver drug and alcohol violations since January 2020⧉, and as of January 2026, 202,345 CDL holders are barred from driving under a 'prohibited' status⧉ until they complete a return-to-duty process.
View data as table
| Motor Carrier Safety Grants (TF) | 536,600,000 | Pass-through grants -- states use these to run their own roadside inspections, compliance reviews, and new-entrant audits |
|---|---|---|
| Motor Carrier Safety Operations and Programs (TF) | 390,000,000 | FMCSA's own rulemaking, enforcement, research, IT, and administration |
| IIJA Supplemental (Division J, GF) | 114,500,000 | Infrastructure-law add-on funding, split between operations and grant programs |
What does it cost to run — money and people?
Congress enacted $1.04 billion in total FY2026 budget authority for FMCSA -- $536.6 million (52%) of it grants passed through to states for their own enforcement, $390.0 million for 's own operations, and $114.5 million in infrastructure-law supplemental funding. Running the agency itself took 1,151 full-time federal employees in FY2026, down from 1,230 the year before. Spread across the country, that budget works out to $3.05 per U.S. resident⧉.
Why is it good for society?
Before January 2020, a truck driver who failed a drug or alcohol test could switch employers and keep driving -- there was no cross-employer way to check. The Clearinghouse FMCSA built under a rule mandated by the 2012 surface-transportation law⧉ closed that gap: as of January 2026 it is actively keeping 202,345 CDL holders⧉ off the road, roughly 1 in 36 of the nation's 7.2 million CDL holders, until they prove they're clean. Nothing in the record shows employers were reliably catching these violations before the database existed.
- 's FY2026 enacted budget ($1.04B) is 52% grants passed through to state and local safety-enforcement partners ($536.6M) -- the agency's own operations, research, and IT run on $390.0M and a workforce of 1,151 , down from 1,230 a year earlier.
- 's Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse has logged 368,984 driver drug and alcohol violations since it opened in January 2020; as of January 2026, 202,345 CDL holders -- roughly 1 in 36 of the nation's 7.2 million CDL holders -- are barred from driving under 'prohibited' status until they complete a return-to-duty process.
Your handles.* Check a trucking company's safety record before you hire it or share the road with it, by number, at 's SAFER Company Snapshot. Report an unsafe truck, bus, or driver directly to through its National Consumer Complaint Database. Comment on an open rulemaking through its docket at regulations.gov.
Sources(5) ▾
- Office of the Federal Register (National Archives and Records Administration), Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration -- agency record (2026-07-16) — The Federal Register's own machine-readable agency-registry entry for -- gives the establishing statute (Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act of 1999, 49 U.S.C. 113), the January 1, 2000 establishment date, its former status as part of the Federal Highway Administration, and its own one-sentence mission statement, quoted directly in this entry's identity paragraph. Fetched live at HTTP 200 (no 403 encountered). archive.org's nearest-snapshot lookup was not run for this JSON API path given the documented Wayback SPN outage risk and the one-probe-then-skip rule -- non-blocking; the live API URL is itself the one-click original-document link. federalregister.gov · original document
- Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration / U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Budget Estimates, Fiscal Year 2027 (2026-06) — 's own FY2027 congressional budget justification -- the most current CJ available, giving FY2026 as an ENACTED column throughout (Exhibit II-1: FY2027 Budget Authority, p.6; Exhibit II-7: Personnel Resource Summary -- Full Time Equivalents, p.14). Source for this entry's headline FY2026 budget-authority and figures, the FY2025 enacted figures used for the KPI deltas, the account-level budget breakdown charted in this entry's figure, the Administrator's Overview population figures (over 800,000 active motor carriers, ~7.2 million CDL holders, ~15 million large trucks and buses, p.1), and the Motor Carrier Safety Grants program description (Exhibit III-1, p.21) describing what state grant recipients do with the money. Direct transportation.gov fetch returns HTTP 403 to automated clients; the Wayback capture above is the one-click original-document link (fetched live at HTTP 200 via archive.org). transportation.gov · original document
- Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration / U.S. Department of Transportation, Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse: December 2025 Monthly Summary Report (2026-01-02) — 's own Clearinghouse monthly summary report, the most recent available (covers activity through December 2025, snapshot dated January 2, 2026). 'Violations Reported to the Clearinghouse' table (p.5) gives 368,984 total drug and alcohol violations reported since January 6, 2020. 'CDL/CLP Holders in the Return-to-Duty (RTD) Process' table (p.9) gives 328,431 total drivers with at least one violation on record, 202,345 in Prohibited status, and 126,086 in Not-Prohibited status, all as of January 2, 2026 -- source for this entry's workload and mechanism figures. Fetched live at HTTP 200 (no 403 encountered); linked from 's Clearinghouse Learning Center news page. archive.org lookup for this specific monthly PDF returned no existing snapshot (a new report each month, rarely pre-crawled) and this session did not run Save Page Now given the documented SPN outage risk -- non-blocking; the live PDF URL is itself the one-click original-document link. clearinghouse.fmcsa.dot.gov · original document
- Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration / Office of the Federal Register, Commercial Driver's License Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse (final rule, 2016-27398) (2016-12-05) — The final rule that created the Drug & Alcohol Clearinghouse, mandated by the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21, 2012). Its published abstract states the rule's purpose was to 'improve roadway safety by identifying commercial motor vehicle (CMV) drivers who have committed drug and alcohol violations that render them ineligible to operate a CMV' -- source for this entry's counterfactual: before the Clearinghouse existed (compliance began January 6, 2020), there was no cross-employer, real-time way to check whether a CDL holder had a disqualifying violation on record elsewhere. Both the Federal Register HTML page and the govinfo.gov PDF of the same published rule were fetched live at HTTP 200; govinfo.gov is used as this entry's capture link since it is the permanent GPO-hosted original document. federalregister.gov · original document
- U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Population Growth Slows Due to Historic Decline in Net International Migration (Vintage 2025 national population estimate) (2026) — The Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 national population estimate: the U.S. resident population reached 341.8 million as of July 1, 2025. Used as this entry's per-resident denominator. Fetched live at HTTP 200 (no 403 encountered this session); Wayback capture attached as a backup one-click link. census.gov · original document
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was established within the U.S. Department of Transportation on January 1, 2000, under the Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act of 1999⧉ (49 U.S.C. 113), split out of the Federal Highway Administration specifically to police interstate trucking and bus safety. Its own charter states its mission is to prevent commercial motor vehicle-related fatalities and injuries. It sits inside the same headquarters building in Washington as the department's nine other operating administrations.