Big DataQ and PSP proposal news. This week, Representatives Tracey Mann and Sharice Davids introduced the Motor Carrier Safety Screening Modernization Act, and it addresses something that’s frustrated safety-conscious carriers for years. The bill has bipartisan support and backing from ATA, OOIDA, CVSA, the National Safety Council, and just about every major industry organization. When you see that kind of coalition, you know the problem they’re solving is real.

Carriers can already run a Pre-Employment Screening Program report when they hire a driver. That PSP pulls from FMCSA’s database and shows you five years of crash data and three years of roadside inspection results, warnings, violations, out-of-service orders, the whole picture. It’s one of the best tools we have for understanding a driver’s actual safety history, not just what showed up in court.

Under current law, once you hire that driver, you’re locked out. You cannot run another PSP to see what’s happened since they came on board. That driver could spend the next six months collecting violations at every scale house from here to California, and unless something results in a conviction that hits their MVR, you have no idea.

The Mann-Davids bill fixes this by allowing carriers to access PSP records for current drivers, not just applicants. That means continuous access to the broader safety event history, the roadside reality that tells you how a driver actually operates, not just the courtroom outcomes that made it onto their MVR.

Why This Matters

I’m often asked about the difference between an MVR and a PSP. The short version: your MVR shows convictions and reportable accidents. That’s it. The PSP shows what actually happened at the roadside: every inspection, every violation, every warning, basically, “ all the things.”

I’ve seen drivers with perfect MVRs whose 6-page PSP reports would keep you up at night. Hours-of-service violations. Load securement failures. Pre-trip inspection issues that make you wonder if this person even has a CDL. None of it resulted in a conviction, so none of it appeared on the clean record the carrier relied on.

FMCSA data shows that carriers that use PSPs have 8 percent fewer crashes and 17 percent fewer out-of-service events. That’s what happens when you make decisions based on complete information. This bill would let carriers maintain that visibility throughout a driver’s employment, not just at the hiring stage.

The bill also fixes the DataQs process so challenges get reviewed by someone other than the officer who issued the original violation. That’s basic fairness. And it maintains all existing driver privacy protections: PSP remains voluntary, the Fair Credit Reporting Act applies, and drivers must still consent.

Fixing The DataQs Mess

The bill also addresses a longstanding challenge for drivers and carriers: the DataQs challenge process.

Here’s how it works now. A driver gets a violation at a roadside inspection that shouldn’t be on their record. A carrier gets hit with a crash determination that wasn’t their driver’s fault, or an inspection violation that’s flat-out wrong and is now dragging down their CSA scores. Maybe the inspector misread the logbook, cited the wrong regulation, or documented something that didn’t actually happen. It happens. Inspectors are human. The driver or carrier files a Request for Data Review through FMCSA’s DataQs system to get the record corrected.

Who reviews that challenge? In many cases, it goes back to the same agency and the same officer who issued the violation in the first place. You’re asking the person who wrote it up to admit they made a mistake. How often do you think that works out?

The success rate on DataQs challenges is abysmal, and a big reason is this fundamental conflict of interest. Drivers and carriers submit legitimate challenges with documentation, evidence, the whole package, and they get denied because the reviewing authority has no incentive to overturn their own work. The system is essentially asking the fox to audit the henhouse.

The Motor Carrier Safety Screening Modernization Act changes this by requiring that DataQs challenges be adjudicated by someone other than the original issuing officer. That’s basic due process. That’s how appeals are supposed to work in any fair system: you don’t get judged by the same person who accused you.

This matters for drivers. A bad inspection that wasn’t their fault shouldn’t follow them for three years on their PSP, costing them job opportunities because the challenge process is stacked against them.

It matters just as much for carriers. That crash your driver didn’t cause? It’s currently in your SMS profile, affecting your CSA scores, appearing when shippers vet your authority, and potentially putting you on FMCSA’s radar for an intervention. If you can’t get legitimate errors corrected because the challenge goes back to the same people who made the error, your safety rating is being determined by bad data, and you have no real way to fix it.

Good drivers deserve a real shot at correcting bad data. Carriers deserve the same. And everyone relying on PSP and SMS data to make safety decisions deserves to know that the records accurately reflect reality, not just whatever the original inspector chose to record.

Why Stop There?

This bill is a good start, but if we’re discussing continuous safety monitoring, we need to address continuous license monitoring as well.

I never thought I’d say this, but we should consider what California is doing.

California’s Pull Notice program requires employers of CDL drivers to enroll in a system that automatically notifies them when a driver’s license status changes or when convictions and accidents hit their record. You don’t have to remember to run a report. You don’t have to hope you catch something before it becomes a catastrophic claim. The system tells you when something happens.

That’s continuous license monitoring, and California has required it for years. It’s not some radical concept. It’s common sense that if you’re responsible for putting a driver on the road, you should know when that driver’s status changes.

So why doesn’t FMCSA require this nationally? Why are we leaving it up to carriers to manually check records and hope they catch problems in time? We have the technology. We have evidence that it works in the country’s largest trucking market. This should be a bipartisan no-brainer.

**Common Sense Reforms Shouldn’t Be This Difficult **

The PSP expansion in this bill is exactly the kind of incremental improvement we need. But it’s 2026, and we’re still playing catch-up on tools that should have been standard a decade ago.

Continuous PSP access after hire? Should have always been the rule. Continuous license monitoring like California’s Pull Notice system? Should be federal. Automatic notifications when a driver’s status changes? The technology exists, we’re just not using it.

None of this is partisan. Nobody’s arguing that carriers should have less information about the people operating 80,000-pound vehicles on public highways. The industry associations are aligned. The safety advocates are aligned. The only thing missing is the political will to get it done.

What Now?

Run a PSP on every driver you hire. At about $10 per report, it’s the cheapest due diligence you’ll ever buy. When this bill passes, build PSP reviews into your ongoing safety management, don’t just check the box at hiring and forget about it.

If you operate in California, make sure you’re enrolled in Pull Notice and actually paying attention to the alerts. If you don’t operate in California, ask yourself why you’re not doing something similar voluntarily. Several third-party services offer continuous MVR monitoring nationwide. Use them.

Contact your representatives. Tell them to support the Motor Carrier Safety Screening Modernization Act, but also note that this should be the beginning of the conversation, not the end. Continuous license monitoring should be next.

The broader picture of a driver’s safety history exists. The PSP shows it. California’s Pull Notice system proves continuous monitoring works. We just need the federal government to catch up to what should have been obvious all along.

In this business, what you don’t know can absolutely hurt you. It’s time we stopped making it so hard for carriers to know.