FMCSA's Elison on Motus: still no date for a full repair — 'weeks, not months,' and stay out if you don't need it

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration still has no date for a full repair of Motus, its troubled new carrier registration system — and the agency's second-in-command is now telling carriers who do not need the system today to stay out of it, according to FreightWaves on Oct. 26. Deputy Administrator Jesse Elison, interviewed at the Broker Compliance Symposium in Chattanooga, offered no new indication that a resolution was at hand, roughly six weeks after he addressed the same problem at a FreightWaves event and about three weeks after he told the National Motor Freight Traffic Association in early October that FMCSA was "weeks away" from fixing the rollout's issues.

What Elison did offer was a timeframe without a date. It would be "really weeks and not months, not like six months before we tackle this, before we stabilize it," he said. He conceded that the system's "user experience" has been built around "working on keeping people out" — which, he noted, is partly the point: the harder gate is meant to ensure that unqualified carriers cannot register. "But it is still absolutely more people than just the bad actors we intended it for," Elison said. The screening itself, he argued, has worked on its own terms: "But that measuring stick, it has worked. But we need to be a little better than that. There are companies out there that want to operate. They want to build this trust."

Conditions, by his account, are at least no longer at their worst. Elison said things are still better than the first four to six weeks of Motus' operations, "which were really, really brutal," and he described a repair process that has itself caused fresh breakage along the way: "You're trying to fix something and then you break it, and then you need to get your handle around that where you're not breaking things and you're going in the right direction." His long-term pitch was unchanged: "Motus is going to deliver. It's going to be the system that really serves the industry."

For carriers caught in the system now, the guidance was direct. FMCSA has waived certain registration requirements as a result of the Motus problems, and Elison's message at the symposium was: "If you don't need to go in, don't go in yet." For those who do have immediate registration needs, he recommended that anyone who cannot fully register should "reach out to your insurance contacts. Reach out to whoever you have to. Reach out directly to FMCSA and we will definitely reach out to them." Users experiencing "challenges" should contact the agency, he added, "because we move on those in real time."

Motus was an inherited project, FreightWaves notes, but neither Elison nor FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs has blamed earlier administrators for its problems. Asked about the midterm elections next week — with a Republican defeat of some magnitude projected for Election Day — Elison said he did not see FMCSA policy changing with the result: "Regardless of how things go over in the next week or so, we are going to continue to deliver, and we've got the support from the Secretary, which is an absolute game changer," he said, while allowing that there "will be a little bit of wind maybe attempted to take that out of our sail."

The appearance also produced two forward-looking regulatory signals. On the broker transparency rule — which will govern, to some degree, what brokers must disclose to shippers and carriers about their own activities, and whose release has looked close to imminent for a while — Elison would only say that "you're going to hear a lot more (FMCSA actions) like the broker transparency rule," part of a set of rules the agency "is going to deliver on in the very near future." And he named new-entrant standards as a priority from the agency's Unified Agenda: FMCSA has said it would seek a formal rulemaking "for ensuring a new applicant carrier is knowledgeable about the applicable safety requirements before being granted New Entrant authority," and is considering a proficiency examination as part of its revised New Entrant Safety Assurance Process, along with other alternatives. Part of that effort, Elison said, would push back against allowing CDL schools to self-certify their compliance with federal rules, with a goal to "bring uniformity across the board."

The practical takeaway for carriers is to treat Motus as a system to enter only on purpose. If a registration task can wait, the deputy administrator himself says to wait — the waivers exist because the agency knows the gate is keeping out qualified companies alongside the bad actors it was built to stop. If the task cannot wait and the system will not let you complete it, document the attempt, call your insurance contacts, and contact FMCSA directly rather than letting authority lapse while you retry a broken portal; Elison says those cases are being moved on in real time. And for anyone planning a new-entrant application, the direction of travel is clear even without dates: expect a knowledge requirement before authority is granted, and expect CDL schools' self-certification to come under pressure.