New Safety Act Slaps 10% Penalty on Freight Brokers Hiring Carriers with Three or More DOT Violations

This bill, officially titled the Patrick and Barbara Kowalski Freight Brokers Safety Act, is all about putting teeth into safety compliance for the logistics industry. Essentially, it creates a serious financial risk for freight brokers—the middlemen who connect companies needing to ship goods with the trucking companies that haul them—if they contract with carriers that have poor safety records.

The New Cost of Cutting Corners

The core of the bill establishes a hefty civil penalty for brokers who contract with a “specified transportation company.” The penalty is set at 10 percent of the value of the contracted cargo for the entire contract. Think of it like this: if a broker signs a $100,000 contract to move product for a year, and it turns out they used an unsafe carrier, they could be on the hook for $10,000. That’s a serious incentive to check the fine print.

What makes a carrier “unsafe” or a “specified transportation company”? The bill defines it clearly: any carrier that, in the five years before the broker contracts with them, has been issued three or more Department of Transportation (DOT) violations, or employs a driver who has racked up three or more DOT violations. This means brokers now have to run deeper background checks than ever before, looking back half a decade to ensure their partners haven't had a pattern of safety problems. For the average person, this is a good thing—it means the companies hauling everything from your Amazon order to your groceries are facing extra scrutiny.

Accountability After a Crash

The bill also gives the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) Administrator new powers to investigate freight brokers after a fatal crash. If a broker contracts a company that later causes a fatal accident, the FMCSA can step in. If the Administrator finds that the broker acted with an “egregious disregard for safety” when hiring that carrier, they can impose additional operating requirements on the broker. This is a bit of a vague term—what exactly counts as “egregious disregard” and what those “additional requirements” might be is left to the FMCSA to figure out. For brokers, this creates a significant, albeit undefined, risk of increased bureaucratic oversight if they make a bad hiring choice.

Safety Funding Gets a Boost

Here’s a detail that affects everyone who drives: all the money collected from these new civil penalties doesn't just go into the general fund. The bill mandates that the Secretary of Transportation must deposit these penalties directly into the Highway Trust Fund. Even better, the Secretary can use these funds immediately for projects that increase roadway safety—without having to wait for Congress to appropriate the money. This creates a direct, self-funding loop: unsafe contracting practices result in fines, and those fines pay for safer roads, guardrails, and infrastructure that benefit every driver on the road.