Dalilah’s Law would put English proficiency, CDL eligibility limits and state penalties into federal statute. It went from a State of the Union line to a committee vote in 22 days, then stopped. I pulled every trucking bill in the last two Congresses, every name on them and the crash data in their states, then walked the bill through every step it still has to clear. My read is that it becomes law only by riding a bill Congress has to pass, and the record since February shows this policy has already moved that way once.

Congress has a system for turning a crash into a law, and on paper it’s simple. A member files a bill. A committee studies it, amends it, and votes. The full House votes, the Senate does the same, the two chambers settle their differences, and the president signs. The Constitution sets the outline in Article I, Section 7, and the House and Senate rulebooks fill in the rest. The system was built to be slow on purpose. It was never built to be silent.

For years we’ve consulted on, assessed advised on and wrote about about how the commercial driver’s license breaks: bus crashes, CDL mills, corrupt examiners, chameleon carriers, and drivers who couldn’t read a construction sign. In July, I ranked the states on what their enforcement dollars buy, then pulled the lawmakers’ side of the same ledger. This series puts those two pieces together around one bill, named for a little girl, that targets most of the failures I’ve documented. This piece explains what the bill is, how it got here, where it’s stuck, who holds the pen, and what it would take to get it to the president.

The girl and the bill

On June 20, 2024, Dalilah Coleman was 5 and riding in her family’s car on Highway 395 in San Bernardino County, California, when traffic slowed for a construction zone. The tractor-trailer behind them, driven by Partap Singh, didn’t stop. The Department of Homeland Security, citing the California Highway Patrol report, says Singh drove at an unsafe speed, failed to stop for traffic and the work zone, and that the crash involved six vehicles. Dalilah spent three weeks in a coma, had a craniectomy, and spent six months in the hospital. Her father, Marcus Coleman, drives a truck for a living.

DHS says Singh entered the country illegally in 2022. California’s DMV issued his CDL and says it verified his documents through the federal SAVE system against an Employment Authorization Document the federal government had approved. By the rules at the time, that was enough. That is the gap the bill aims at: a license lawful on paper, issued through the federal verification process, to a driver the crash report says drove into a stopped work zone.

The legislative record starts on Oct. 3, 2025, when Rep. David Rouzer, R-N.C., chairman of the Highways and Transit Subcommittee, filed H.R. 5688 as the Non-Domiciled CDL Integrity Act. At the State of the Union on Feb. 24, 2026, President Trump named Dalilah from the podium and asked Congress for a law. The next day, Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., filed S. 3917, the Dalilah Law, with Sens. James Risch, James Lankford, and Shelley Moore Capito, and it was referred to the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. On March 4, Rep. Erin Houchin, R-Ind., filed a House version, H.R. 7793, with Reps. Vince Fong and Jay Obernolte. A fourth version, H.R. 7758, was filed March 3, and a second Senate bill, S. 4224, the Dalilah’s Law Act, followed on March 26. On March 16, Rouzer released an amendment in the nature of a substitute that renamed H.R. 5688 Dalilah’s Law and grew it to eight sections, text his office said was written in coordination with the White House, the Department of Transportation and the committee.

The eight sections, in plain terms. Section 2 makes every CDL test English-only, requires drivers to read and speak English well enough to deal with police, signs and reports, and turns a first English out-of-service order into a disqualifying offense. Rep. Dave Taylor, R-Ohio, got that section labeled Connor’s Law by voice vote, for Connor Dzion, 18, killed in Florida in 2017. Section 3 limits CDLs to citizens, nationals, and lawful permanent residents; keeps non-domiciled licenses only for H-2A, H-2B, and E-2 visa holders, caps them at one year, and orders every state to audit its unexpired non-domiciled licenses within a year. Section 4 lets the government withhold up to 8% of a noncompliant state’s core highway formula money in the first year and 12% after, effective Oct. 1, 2026. Section 5 makes states honor each other’s disqualifications. Section 6 makes it a carrier violation to knowingly use a driver without a compliant CDL or English qualification and lets FMCSA withhold, suspend, amend, or revoke that carrier’s registration. Section 7 bars registration of foreign-based brokers and bans offshore dispatch after a year, with a minimum penalty of $50,000. Section 8 orders a rule within 18 months to fix self-certification on the Training Provider Registry.

How we got here

The federal CDL is 40 years old. Before the Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1986, states handed out truck licenses with no common standard, and a driver with a suspension in one state could get a clean license in the next. That law, now chapter 313 of title 49, created one license per driver, national testing floors, and the power to take highway money from states that don’t meet them. The English rule is older than the CDL. It sits in 49 CFR 391.11(b)(2), and for most of the last decade it went unenforced at roadside: a 2016 FMCSA out-of-service policy told inspectors not to put drivers out of service for it.

The current push started in the executive branch. An April 2025 executive order restored English proficiency as an out-of-service condition, effective June 25, 2025. After the Aug. 12, 2025 Florida Turnpike crash, FMCSA issued an interim final rule on Sept. 29, 2025, limiting non-domiciled CDLs to the three visa classes, and the D.C. Circuit stayed it in November. FMCSA reissued it as a final rule effective March 16, 2026. A different D.C. Circuit panel refused to stay that version on May 5 and heard the merits on Sept. 15. DOT moved to withhold about $160 million from California and $73.5 million from New York, and North Carolina canceled or downgraded 1,147 licenses after an FMCSA audit.

Then Congress did something the first version of this piece missed. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026, the spending law President Trump signed Feb. 3 to end a partial government shutdown, directed the Secretary of Transportation to update DOT’s regulations so that failing the English requirement in 391.11(b)(2) triggers an out-of-service order. The same law set aside $200 million specifically for truck parking. FMCSA’s Aug. 10 proposal to write the English out-of-service standard into regulation is the agency carrying out that direction.

Part of this is already statute, and it got there inside a spending bill. The rest is still executive action. The non-domiciled limits live in an FMCSA rule under court review, and the funding withholdings are agency decisions being litigated state by state. Every one of those can be undone by a court or by the next administration. That is the argument for the rest of Dalilah’s Law. Todd Spencer, president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, told The Center Square last week that the bill would make the administration’s policy permanent and protect it from future court decisions or a new administration. A court reviewing a rule asks whether the agency followed the Administrative Procedure Act. A court reviewing a statute asks whether Congress had the power to pass it. Those are different fights, and the second one is harder to win.

The whole machine

Before he was the Transportation Secretary withholding hundreds of millions of dollars from states for not enforcing hard enough, Sean Duffy spent nearly nine years in the House, from 2011 to 2019, and put his name on roughly 820 pieces of legislation. Four involved trucking: a clarification of the agricultural hours-of-service exemption, the Drug-Free Commercial Driver Act (backed twice) on hair testing, and the Safe, Flexible, and Efficient Trucking Act of 2015 to allow heavier trucks on the interstate. All four were referred to the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit and never heard from again. In fairness, Duffy sat on Financial Services, not Transportation, and a secretary’s job is to execute law, not write it. His record is still the pattern.

To measure it, I screened every bill introduced in the 118th and 119th Congresses, 36,608 in all, against a tight set of trucking terms: motor carrier, CDL, hours of service, FMCSA, and the like. That produced 79 bills. I pulled every sponsor and cosponsor on all 79, matched them to committee assignments, and laid them against the crash, inspection, and enforcement numbers from the state rankings I published July 7.

Three of the 79 became law. Two are CDL housekeeping: the Veteran Improvement Commercial Driver License Act, signed Oct. 1, 2024, which eases the path for veterans, and the Strengthening the Commercial Driver’s License Information System Act, a data upgrade to the system states use to share driver records. Good bills. Neither puts an inspector on a ramp. The third is a Congressional Review Act resolution striking down California’s Advanced Clean Trucks rule. Plenty of drivers cheered that repeal, and I was one of them. It’s still a deregulation.

The screen has a blind spot, and it’s the most important finding in this piece. The biggest trucking enforcement change Congress made in this window wasn’t one of the 79. It was a paragraph in an appropriations act. Stand-alone trucking bills went nowhere. The English out-of-service rule and $200 million for parking got through because they rode a bill that had to pass.

Of the 76 that didn’t pass, 69 were referred to committee and never touched again. Five cleared committee and were placed on the House calendar without a floor vote. Two of those are bills the industry spent years asking for. The Motor Carrier Safety Selection Standard Act, H.R. 915, would have set a national standard for vetting a carrier before handing it freight. The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee ordered it reported on May 23, 2023; it went on the Union Calendar as No. 639 and died there when the 118th Congress ended. It’s back as H.R. 5337. The Truck Parking Safety Improvement Act, H.R. 2367, would have authorized $755 million in parking grants and passed the committee 60-4 on the same day. The committee’s written report, H. Rept. 118-936, wasn’t filed until Dec. 19, 2024, 19 months later and two weeks before that Congress expired. It’s back as H.R. 1659. Truck parking money finally arrived this year, $200 million of it, in the spending law.

“Ordered reported” means the committee voted. The bill isn’t on the calendar until the committee files its written report, and a committee can hold that report as long as it wants.

Slow is a design choice. The framers split the lawmaking power across two chambers with different electorates and terms, and gave the president a veto, so that one bad week couldn’t become permanent law. A lot of what dies in committee deserves to die. Some of the 69 were messaging bills. The Selection Standard Act would deem a broker reasonable if it checked a carrier’s registration, insurance, and FMCSA safety status, a safe harbor that cuts against the families who bring negligent selection claims. Sponsorship counts measure attention, not quality: one good bill beats 10 press releases with bill numbers on them.

Dallilah’s Law has real opponents with real arguments. At the March 18 markup, Democrats said the text would strip CDLs from refugees, asylees, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients who hold lawful status and read and write English. When the D.C. Circuit stayed the interim rule in November, the panel wrote that FMCSA’s own data appeared to show the excluded drivers were involved in fatal crashes at a lower rate than the drivers who stayed eligible. Nobody arguing for the bill, me included, gets to skip that finding.

The workhorses and the chairman’s zero

The names on the 79 bills aren’t the ones most people would guess. In the House, the heaviest lifters over the two Congresses are Rep. Tracey Mann of Kansas with 12, Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas, a former sheriff whose district sits on the Houston freight corridor, with 11, Rep. Rudy Yakym of Indiana with 10, and Rep. Chris Pappas of New Hampshire, the leading Democrat, with 9. In the Senate, Deb Fischer of Nebraska is the chamber’s most prolific author of trucking bills, with Wyoming’s Cynthia Lummis and Michigan’s Gary Peters among the most active. Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Indiana, and New Hampshire: freight corridors and farm states, whose members live with trucks whether they picked the issue or not. Nearly all of that work sits in the same subcommittee where Duffy’s four bills went a decade ago.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee owns trucking. Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri chairs it. Across both Congresses, my pull shows Graves’ name on none of the 79. Neither is the ranking member, Rep. Rick Larsen of Washington. Down a level, Rouzer, the Highways and Transit chairman, had four, and the subcommittee’s ranking member, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton of the District of Columbia, who has no floor vote, had two.

Chairmen traditionally don’t cosponsor. A chairman’s power is the gavel, not the signature: he decides what gets a markup, and Graves’ committee moved Dalilah’s Law, the Selection Standard Act, and the parking bill. When Rouzer’s bill cleared committee, he thanked “Chairman Graves, Secretary Duffy, and my colleagues” for the swift action. Judged as a traffic cop, Graves let traffic through. On the other side of that ledger, the two bills the industry wanted most sat on a calendar the majority controls until Congress ran out, and when Graves wrote his own highway bill, he left Dalilah’s Law out.

Laws against Graves

For every state, I set how many House members signed any trucking bill against the state’s truck crash deaths in fiscal 2025 and how its enforcement program performs. The question is whether the places carrying the burden produce the lawmakers doing the work.

Sometimes they do. Texas had 21,006 truck crashes and 323 deaths in fiscal 2025, and its delegation is the most active in the country: 21 of its 38 House members signed trucking bills, 60 sponsorships in all, with Nehls near the top of the individual list. Whether Texas’ bills fix Texas’ problems is a fair follow-up. Nobody can say the delegation ignored the issue.

Then there’s my home state. Virginia lost 104 people to truck crashes in fiscal 2025. It runs the most expensive inspections among the big states, $424 apiece, and one of the thinnest programs, 26,259 inspections all year. Put together, Virginia has the worst enforcement coverage ratio in the country: nearly one crash for every five inspections. California runs 45 inspections per crash. Virginia’s delegation of 11 produced 16 sponsorships, none from the House leaders. Georgia runs close behind: 188 deaths, one crash for every seven inspections, and a delegation in the middle of the pack.

At the far end is Hawaii, the only state whose entire delegation, House and Senate, signed zero trucking bills across both Congresses. Hawaii’s freight profile is an island economy with no interstate trucking in the mainland sense, so its zero is the most explainable one on the table. Hawaii still recorded 15 truck crash deaths in fiscal 2025.

Across the table, legislative attention follows freight geography, which makes sense. It doesn’t follow the burden. The states where the crash-to-inspection math is most broken are legislatively unremarkable. The enforcement fight consuming the industry, over English proficiency, licensing and withheld highway money, has been fought mostly by the executive branch, with one paragraph of help from appropriators.

The road to Dalilah’s Law 

On March 18, the committee took Rouzer’s substitute by voice vote, rejected Larsen’s alternative 27-34, and ordered the bill reported 35-26, roll call 70. Legis1 counted 22 days from the State of the Union to that vote. As of today, it’s been 187 days, and the House hasn’t voted.

The bill reaches the Union Calendar once the committee files its written report. From there, House leadership picks one of two routes. Under suspension of the rules, the bill gets 40 minutes of debate, no amendments, and requires a two-thirds vote. Under a special rule, the Rules Committee writes the terms of debate, the House adopts that rule by simple majority, then passes the bill by simple majority. Members who want to force the issue without leadership can file a discharge petition, which needs 218 signatures.

Then the Senate. S. 3917 has sat in the Commerce Committee since Feb. 25 with no hearing and no markup. Even if the Senate takes up the House bill directly, it needs 60 votes to end debate, and the versions don’t match: the Senate text orders every CDL holder recertified within 180 days, and the House text doesn’t. The chambers would have to reconcile the difference before either version reaches the president. If none of that happens by noon on Jan. 3, 2027, when the 119th Congress ends, every version dies, and the next Congress starts with a new bill number, as the Selection Standard Act and the parking bill did.

Why it’s slow

No leader has said on the record why the bill hasn’t been scheduled. OOIDA wrote Speaker Mike Johnson in July asking for a vote “without further delay.” The American Trucking Associations, the Truckload Carriers Association, and National Tank Truck Carriers are on record for it. The Center Square reported on Sept. 16 that the bill remains stalled while supporters pushed it again at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas. The rest of this section is my read of the record.

The committee split 35-26, which is 57%. If the floor splits the same way, the bill fails under suspension, which takes two-thirds. That leaves the rule route, which needs Rules Committee time and a floor slot from leadership, and a majority willing to take a party-line immigration vote weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms.

The highway deadline meant to force the question has moved. Surface transportation authority under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was set to expire Sept. 30. Instead, Congress folded a short extension into the stopgap spending law. The Senate passed it 90-6 on Aug. 8, the House passed it 370-48 under suspension on Sept. 1, and President Trump signed it Sept. 2. Highway and transit programs now run through Dec. 11. The committee’s five-year replacement, the BUILD America 250 Act, H.R. 8870, cleared committee 62-2 in May and hasn’t reached the floor, and the Senate hasn’t released its own text. Dalilah’s Law isn’t in the House highway bill. Truckload Carriers Association officials said publicly last month they were surprised it didn’t make the cut, and one of them said Graves wants a bipartisan bill.

Section 4 takes effect Oct. 1, 2026, 10 days from today. A bill that hasn’t passed one chamber can’t hit that date, so the text needs work before it can move.

With the final rule in force since March 16 and the English out-of-service standard now required by statute, leadership can tell itself the policy is already happening. The court calendar is the counterweight. The D.C. Circuit heard California’s challenge to its withholding on Sept. 11 and the Lujan challenge to the rule itself on Sept. 15, where the panel questioned the rule’s E-2 carve-out and FMCSA’s lawyer answered one question with “I don’t know.” The Second Circuit hears New York’s case on Sept. 28. A ruling against the rule would turn the permanence argument from theory into a deadline.

The only road that goes through

My read is that Dalilah’s Law doesn’t become law as a stand-alone bill in this Congress. The math doesn’t allow it. The House could pass it by simple majority under a rule if leadership wanted to. The Senate is the wall. A stand-alone bill needs 60 votes to end debate; Republicans hold 53 seats, the committee vote in the House was party-line, and the Senate committee hasn’t held a hearing. Reconciliation doesn’t work either, because budget rules keep a policy change like CDL eligibility out of a filibuster-proof budget bill.

That leaves a must-pass bill, and I think there are two candidates, not one.

The highway bill is the natural home. The whole bill sits in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s jurisdiction. Section 4’s penalty is a cut to highway formula money, which is money a highway bill writes. Congress has put CDL policy in highway bills before, including the under-21 apprenticeship pilot in the 2021 infrastructure law. The Dec. 11 extension puts the next highway bill, or the next extension, squarely in the lame-duck session after the election, when members who’ve already faced the voters are freer to take hard votes. The catch is that Graves left it out of his bill to keep it bipartisan, and a highway bill needs Democratic votes in the Senate. Adding Dalilah’s Law could cost the highway bill the very votes it needs, which is the argument leadership will make for leaving it out.

The second vehicle is the spending bill, and it has already worked once. The government is funded only through Dec. 11, so Congress has to pass either full-year appropriations or another stopgap in the same lame-duck window. That’s exactly how the English out-of-service requirement became law in February. A spending bill can’t comfortably carry all eight sections, but it carried one directive and $200 million for parking without anyone having to vote on “Dalilah’s Law” by name.

History backs the must-pass reading, too. The Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1986, the law that created the CDL in the first place, didn’t pass as a stand-alone trucking bill. It passed as a title inside the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986.

Getting there will take a bigger bill, and the highway bill is the likeliest. It isn’t the only one, and the version that survives is likely to be smaller than eight sections. The English testing and eligibility language in Sections 2 and 3 and the state penalty in Section 4 are the pieces with the strongest industry backing. The foreign broker and offshore dispatch ban in Section 7 and the Training Provider Registry fix in Section 8 are the likeliest to ride separately or wait. If nothing moves by Jan. 3, 2027, it starts over with a new number, and the policy lives or dies in court.

Bills and actions in motion

Dalilah’s Law isn’t moving on its own. H.R. 5688, H.R. 7793, H.R. 7758, S. 3917 and S. 4224 carry versions of it. The Selection Standard Act is pending as H.R. 5337, and the Supreme Court’s 9-0 decision in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II on May 14 sent negligent selection claims against brokers to juries, which changes the stakes for that bill. Truck parking is pending as H.R. 1659, alongside the $200 million already appropriated. BUILD America 250 is the reauthorization vehicle, now due by Dec. 11 or another extension. On the regulatory side, FMCSA’s Aug. 10 proposal to write the English out-of-service standard into regulation, Docket FMCSA-2026-0826, takes comments into early October. The agency reports 60,399 English proficiency violations and 19,045 out-of-service orders between June 25, 2025 and March 19, 2026. The Lujan case, No. 26-1032, and California’s challenge to the $160 million withholding are both before the D.C. Circuit, and New York’s case is before the Second Circuit.

How it lands

For drivers who came up through a real school and can read a detour sign, the bill mostly writes down what they thought the rules already were. For roughly 194,000 non-domiciled CDL holders, it ends the card at renewal unless they hold one of three visas, including people with lawful status and clean U.S. records. For carriers, Section 6 turns a bad hire into a registration problem. For brokers, Montgomery already made selection a jury question, and the Pennsylvania lawsuit over Trooper Michael Pahira Jr.’s death on July 1 is one of the first to test it on a driver-eligibility fact pattern. For insurers, each of those is a reserve question. For states, it’s a percentage of highway money they lose each year they don’t comply. For taxpayers, it’s whether the next rule survives the next court.

What this series does

The installments that follow go back through the 30 Days of Why record and the investigations since, crash by crash and carrier by carrier, and say where Dalilah’s Law would have reached the case and where it wouldn’t have. Some of the deadliest cases in that record involved U.S. citizens with state-issued licenses and fatigue, drug, or maintenance failures the bill doesn’t touch. The series says so each time.

The last installment follows the money: the campaign contributions, the committees and the people who wrote the checks, laid against the same enforcement record. That’s the oldest question the ledger can answer: whether the signatures follow the districts or the donors.

Dalilah Coleman is 7. She’s in first grade and learning to walk again. Her father has stood in the House gallery and at a podium in Detroit asking for one law. Across two Congresses, 79 trucking bills went into the machine, and three came out. The one piece of this policy that has become law so far got there inside a spending bill, three weeks before her father stood in that gallery. For 187 days, Congress has had the rest of it on the calendar, and the next bills it has to pass come due Dec. 11.