The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration sent a revised broker transparency proposal to the White House Office of Management and Budget on Aug. 27, clearing the last internal checkpoint before a rulemaking is published in the Federal Register and opened for public comment. The submission was reported by Overdrive on Aug. 28 and follows a series of missed target dates on the agency's regulatory calendar.
FMCSA published its first broker transparency proposal in November 2024. That version would have made it a regulatory obligation for brokers to disclose the transaction record for a given load. It drew thousands of comments on the federal docket and then sat without movement. Rather than advancing to a final rule, the agency signaled it would issue a supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking, a step typically taken when a proposal has changed significantly since publication.
The agency has said little about what the new version will contain. The most recent Unified Agenda ties the proposal to petitions filed in 2020 by the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association and the Small Business in Transportation Coalition. OOIDA asked FMCSA to require brokers to provide an electronic copy of each transaction record within 48 hours after a contracted service is complete, and to bar contract language forcing carriers to waive access to those records. The Small Business in Transportation Coalition asked the agency to prohibit brokers from requiring parties to waive review rights as a condition of doing business.
Review at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is capped at 90 days by executive order, with a possible 30-day extension. Recent Overdrive reader surveying found more than half of owner-operators strongly favored the 2024 proposal as written.
Source: Overdrive - https://www.overdriveonline.com/regulations/article/15833626/fmcsa-moves-on-broker-transparency-sb-i5-closure-incoming