{"id":199899,"date":"2026-04-16T21:23:07","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T21:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/199899\/"},"modified":"2026-04-16T21:23:07","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T21:23:07","slug":"n-y-loses-74m-for-not-revoking-illegal-trucker-licenses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/199899\/","title":{"rendered":"N.Y. loses $74M for not revoking illegal trucker licenses"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York will lose more than $73.5 million in federal money because the Transportation Department said Thursday that state has refused to revoke nearly 33,000\u00a0questionable commercial driver’s licenses<\/a>\u00a0for immigrants since an audit uncovered problems last year.<\/p>\n

The department said that more than half of the 200 licenses reviewed during the audit had significant problems such as remaining valid long after an immigrant was authorized to be in the country. So the state was ordered to review all of this type of licenses and revoke illegal ones.<\/p>\n

The federal government\u00a0has reviewed records<\/a>\u00a0related to these non-domiciled CDLs in every state since Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy put a spotlight on this issue after\u00a0an August crash in Florida<\/a>\u00a0that killed three people. Most states have either complied or are in negotiations with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, but\u00a0California has lost<\/a>\u00a0$200 million. Several other states \u2014 including\u00a0Pennsylvania<\/a>, Minnesota and\u00a0North Carolina<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 have been warned they are at risk of losing some funding.<\/p>\n

\u201cI promised the American people I would hold any state leader accountable for failing to keep them safe from unvetted, unqualified foreign drivers. I\u2019m delivering on that promise today,\u201d Duffy said.<\/p>\n

Duffy has said that immigrants account for about 20% of all truck drivers nationwide, but these non-domiciled licenses immigrants can receive only represent about 5% of all commercial driver\u2019s licenses or about 200,000 drivers. New York issued 32,606 of them.<\/p>\n

New York officials have defended their licensing practices and said they are complying with federal law and that audits done during the first Trump administration supported that. Duffy also has threatened to pull federal funding from New York if it does not abandon a\u00a0congestion pricing fee<\/a>\u00a0in New York City and if\u00a0crime on the subway system<\/a>\u00a0is not addressed.<\/p>\n

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s spokesman Sean Butler said the action related to commercial driver’s licenses seems to be part of broad effort to attack blue states.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis continues a yearlong pattern of Secretary Duffy threatening to withhold money that keeps our roads, subways, and other infrastructure safe for New Yorkers. We will fight back, and once again we will win,\u201d Butler said.<\/p>\n

Trucking industry groups have praised the Transportation Department’s efforts to get unqualified drivers off the road, crack down on\u00a0questionable trucking schools<\/a>\u00a0and go after\u00a0trucking companies<\/a>\u00a0that violate the rules and then just change their names and keep operating. The industry said that too often unqualified drivers who shouldn\u2019t have licenses or\u00a0can\u2019t speak English<\/a>\u00a0have been allowed to get behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound (about 39,916 kilograms) truck.<\/p>\n

But immigrant groups say that some drivers are now being\u00a0unfairly targeted.<\/a>\u00a0The spotlight has been on Sikh truckers because the driver in the Florida crash and the driver in\u00a0another fatal crash<\/a>\u00a0in California in October are both Sikhs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York will lose more than $73.5 million in federal money because the Transportation Department said Thursday that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69051,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[109,116,118,257,9,24,11,10,49,51,50,12,112,87,27],"class_list":{"0":"post-199899","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-app-local-state-politics","9":"tag-app-ny-state-of-politics","10":"tag-associated-press","11":"tag-central-ny","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-city","14":"tag-new-york-headlines","15":"tag-new-york-news","16":"tag-new-york-state","17":"tag-new-york-state-headlines","18":"tag-new-york-state-news","19":"tag-news","20":"tag-ny-state-of-politics","21":"tag-politics","22":"tag-top-stories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199899"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199899\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}