US shippers searching for truck capacity are running out of time — literally. The US government is not only targeting non-compliant truck drivers but illegal driving time, cracking down on tampering with electronic logging devices (ELDs) that track driver hours.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has removed about 90 types of ELDs from its list of certified devices over the past two years, and revocations continue, with 15 certifications revoked in the second quarter and five more ELDs removed from the list on Aug. 6.

Drivers caught using devices that are revoked will be subject to out-of-service orders.

Those devices didn’t meet requirements designed to prevent falsification and manipulation of truck driver hours of service records — the reason FMCSA mandated electronic logging for most commercial truck drivers in the first place in 2018.

The latest action is another turn of the screw for a truck market already squeezed by an FMCSA crackdown on truck driver licensing, English-language proficiency, driver training schools, “chameleon” carriers and cabotage by foreign drivers.

The impact on truck availability, especially in the truckload sector, has been dramatic, and so has the increase in spot market and contract truckload rates. The crackdown is affecting the intermodal rail and less-than-truckload (LTL) markets, and even cargo crime.

Truckload spot rates have risen 40% or more year over year, and contract rates are expected to hit a 20% annualized increase by the end of the fourth quarter.

“There’s a multifaceted level of enforcement going on,” Derek Leathers, CEO of Werner Enterprises, said at Deutsche Bank’s 2026 Industrial Conference last week. “Most of the focus has been on the non-domiciled CDL ... but the reality is there’s a lot more going on.”

ELDs have probably received “the least attention” of all the areas the FMCSA has targeted, Leathers said. That may change as the extent of the loss of truckload capacity becomes clearer, especially if freight demand surges during trucking’s fall peak season.

Attacking ELD fraud constrains available truck capacity by shrinking a phantom fleet built not on actual trucks but extra hours. Closing loopholes that allow manipulation of ELDs takes those hours out of a driver’s schedule and compresses shipper supply chains.

“Once you start to crack down on the ELDs, you start to limit the amount of miles that the market is able to run,” said Michael Beckwith, vice president of operations at Odyssey Logistics. “Ultimately, it’s going to affect supply and the ability to meet demand.”

‘Digitizing’ problems

When the ELD mandate took effect in 2018, many truckload shippers saw transit times stretch from one to two days, as truck drivers that used to run 600 to 800 miles overnight using fake logbooks were caught short of time when they began using electronic logs.

According to some estimates, the ELD mandate removed as much as 3% of truckload capacity from the market, and the market took about 18 months to normalize.

Since then, however, ways have been found to hack devices and manipulate ELD data. In some cases, ELDs are reset remotely, giving drivers a clean log. A market for ELDs whose logs can be manipulated grew as demand and capacity grew in 2021 and 2022.

“We just digitized the problem,” said Beckwith. “We moved from a paper log to an electronic log, but there was still no enforcement body holding ELD manufacturers accountable for quality and certification of their devices’ capabilities.”

Certification is an area FMCSA has focused on this year. Although manufacturers still self-certify ELDs, the FMCSA toughened its vetting process last December, introducing additional steps to detect fraud and keep non-compliant devices out of the market.

When it comes to certification, “they’ve stopped nearly 500 new entrants into the marketplace because the ELDs didn’t pass the basic kind of sniff test of certification and they were too easily able to be edited or manipulated,” Leathers told analysts at the Deutsche Bank conference.

Third-party certification

Leathers believes the FMCSA should go further and require third-party certification of ELDs, just as Canada does in its ELD market. “Seldom does this industry ask for regulation, but in this case, they need to be certifying these electronic logging devices,” he said.

The FMCSA and its state partners are taking enforcement to the roads as well. For the first time, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance focused its International Roadcheck roadside inspection campaign in May on ELD violations. Results have yet to be released.

However, more than 7,200 truck drivers have received out of service orders this year to date for allegedly tampering with an ELD “so the device does not accurately record or retain required data,” according to FMCSA’s online database of inspection data.

There is no record of that violation being used from 2022 through 2025, although more than 90,000 drivers were placed out of service for not having an ELD over that time.

There are carriers “that are only able to operate today because of the ability to manipulate hours,” Leathers said. It’s likely some of those carriers are among those exiting the business due to stricter licensing and English-language proficiency requirements.