Staff Reports
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is doing what too many in Washington won’t: calling out Gavin Newsom’s California for flouting federal safety rules and refusing to enforce English proficiency checks for commercial truck drivers. Duffy announced the Department of Transportation will withhold roughly $40 million from California — a blunt, necessary move to protect American families on the road.
This fight exploded after a deadly Florida crash that killed three people and exposed how a driver who failed an English test wound up behind the wheel of an 80,000-pound rig with a California-issued commercial license. That tragedy stripped away the political euphemisms and showed the real-world cost of lax enforcement and political theater.
Federal auditors found systemic failures in how California is applying the renewed English-language rules, with inspections rarely resulting in drivers being taken out of service despite clear regulatory guidance. When bureaucrats treat safety requirements like optional suggestions, the consequence is predictable: more risk on our highways and innocent lives lost.
California’s political class rushed to defend itself, waving statistics about statewide crash rates while ignoring the core problem: the state has been twisting rules to issue commercial licenses to drivers who shouldn’t have them. The federal government has rightly warned that if California won’t follow the law, it will see even steeper funding consequences — up to $160 million for failures in CDL issuance.
Let’s be blunt: this isn’t a debate about compassion, it’s a debate about competence and the rule of law. Coastal elites can’t substitute virtue-signaling for basic enforcement that keeps school buses, tankers, and family vehicles safe, and Secretary Duffy is right to demand accountability.
If California wants to prioritize politics over public safety, it should be prepared to face the consequences — federal funding is not a slush fund for ideological experiments. Americans deserve common-sense safeguards like English proficiency checks for commercial drivers, plain and simple, and anyone who puts politics ahead of that should be voted out and investigated for negligence.
Patriots know our nation is strongest when laws are enforced equally and officials put citizens first, not their headlines. This fight is about more than one state or one tragedy; it’s about restoring the basic obligation of government to protect its people, and every hardworking American should stand with Secretary Duffy until the rule of law is restored on our roads.
