C.H. Robinson Lost in Court, So Now Small Carriers Pay the Tab
The Supreme Court handed CHR a liability ruling. CHR turned it into a toll booth. Here's what the new vetting gates actually cost small carriers.
By Herman Armstrong
In a deposition taken after a fatal 2022 Christmas Eve crash in Ohio, the operator of the carrier involved testified that a C.H. Robinson representative coached him to open a new trucking company after his previous outfit faced a federal shutdown for safety violations. C.H. Robinson disputed that account. Fine. But that posture — deny the specific, announce the policy — is the whole story.
The policy CHR announced after losing Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II at the Supreme Court on May 14: a seven-day freeze on carriers with new authorities, CSA BASIC thresholds set at the 65th percentile for Unsafe Driving and Hours of Service and the 80th percentile for Driver Fitness and Vehicle Maintenance, plus higher insurance minimums. Those aren't guidelines. They are gates. A startup carrier or a small fleet with one unresolved DataQs dispute either clears them or doesn't get loaded.
CHR didn't absorb the liability the Court handed it. It converted that liability into a toll booth and put small carriers on the paying side.
The structural excuse writes itself: the number of trucking firms grew 31% since 2015 while FMCSA's workforce shrank 10%. The federal registration system the broker industry always pointed to as its shield — licensed means vetted — was always thin. The Court said so explicitly, noting there is "no meaningful federal safety regulation" of brokers' carrier-selection practices. Now CHR is building the private vetting infrastructure the federal government never built, and charging carriers the admission price.
TIA President and CEO Chris Burroughs called the ruling "an impossible task," comparing brokers to travel agents who shouldn't have to evaluate airline safety. The travel-agent line is the tell. Travel agents don't take 15% to put an 80,000-pound vehicle on the road. Brokers do, and they spent years arguing that a USDOT number was due diligence enough.
Husch Blackwell Partner Julie Maurer said brokers who conduct reasonable due diligence "should be well-positioned to defend against such claims." Maurer is right, and that's the problem. The new vetting standard is survivable for large carriers with clean CSA profiles and compliance staff. For a three-truck operation with one disputed speeding violation dragging a BASIC score past the 65th percentile, it's a deactivation letter.
If your CSA scores carry inaccurate violations, the DataQs structured appellate process published April 16 is the one practical tool you have right now. Clean records are the only thing standing between your authority and CHR's new gate.