As the White House touts taking “over 2,000 fraudulent CDL mills out of business,” some of the nation’s biggest CDL schools have been issued a notice of proposed removal from the Training Provider Registry.
Those include 144 locations of 160 Driving Academy, a nationwide chain of CDL schools with more than 170 schools nationwide, likewise all eight locations of the Truck Driver Institute, in business since 1973. The school lists Werner, Fedex, Schneider, Averitt and many others as carrier partners.
Ancora, one of the nation’s biggest vocational training firms of any kind, has 289 locations listed for proposed removal.
First Student has almost 100 schools listed. Transtech, fleet Millis Transfer, and about a dozen other multi-location or recognizable names were all issued notices of proposed removals in the last week.
Together, the schools likely train more than one hundred thousand CDL drivers each year, including prospective bus drivers, Class B, and everything else.
On Monday, Departments of Transportation and Homeland Security, nine state Attorneys General, and the White House Fraud Task Force announced their “Historic Interagency Effort to Crack Down on Fraud in Trucking Industry,” including notices of proposed removal for 160 schools.
According to a release, the notices were a result of in-person audits: “Drivers certified by these 160+ ELDT providers are linked to 239 commercial motor vehicle-related fatalities.”
DOT Secretary Sean Duffy and FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs described finding schools with inadequate facilities, unlicensed instructors, missing documentation, and fraudulent classrooms.
Since the initial batch of 160 announced Monday, FMCSA has issued hundreds more, including to some of those biggest schools in the country.
Most told Overdrive Thursday they’re in the “missing documentation” category.
The Commercial Vehicle Training Association, a big supporter of FMCSA’s TPR clean up, represents many of the big schools.
[Related: CDL schools applaud DOT, DHS crackdown on ‘deluge of bad actors’ in driver training]
“CVTA strongly supports FMCSA’s oversight actions aimed at removing bad actors from the industry,” CVTA Executive Director Andrew Poliakoff said in a statement. CVTA has long reported bad schools to states and FMCSA, and in April of 2025 actually wrote a letter calling for a crackdown on “unscrupulous” actors in the training space.
“We’ve been working in partnership with the FMCSA to draw attention to the two and three day programs that operate as CDL mills and we hope that many of those CDL mills will continue to be removed,” said Poliakoff. “We’ve not seen the data set, but we’re hopeful that many of them were part of the recent emergency removals.”
About the issue of hundreds of CVTA member schools proposed for removal, Poliakoff shared the sentiment many of the individual schools expressed.
“The majority of Notices of Proposed Removal we’re aware of have been issued for a variety of administrative issues, most predominantly for not having a compliance form for students to sign to show their adherence to the FMCSA regs in 49 CFR 380.707(a),” he wrote.
Poliakoff added that once CVTA schools became aware of FMCSA’s wishes, they quickly worked to comply with the mostly paperwork-based asks, and hope to get off the list “within a few days or weeks.”
But FMCSA is clearly playing hardball.
Poliakoff has seen notices issued for as little as “missing a single sub-element within an endorsement curriculum (not currently being taught at the school) or for listing a program like Class B training for organizations that didn’t have a Class B vehicle on-site when an investigator visited the school (because there was not Class B currently being offered there),” he wrote. “For those, the schools insert the missing sub-element or delist that they offer the already-inactive endorsement at that location, notify FMCSA, and then within a few days or weeks they’re removed from the NOPR list.”
Same for the Class B example, he added. “Again, the school might just delist the Class B program if it’s inactive anyway.”
Also, it seems FMCSA is serving notice to all schools in a network for issues found with one, or even an online program. Perhaps that explains all 289 Ancora locations getting listed in one fell swoop.
“We understand that FMCSA recently instituted a process change whereby a location deficiency now triggers a company-wide NOPR,” he said.
The good news is fixing that one location’s deficiency will get all the locations off the hook, but the result is “incredibly unfortunate because having a NOPR listing is a stressful time, particularly for any high-quality training provider … and having multiples of them even more so,” said Poliakoff.
Don’t expect any massive-scale CDL school closures. The notices give time for schools to get back into compliance, and any major CDL school would do just that.
“Fortunately, schools on the NOPR can still operate, but again that doesn’t diminish the impact of being listed, particularly on good schools,” concluded Poliakoff.
[Related: DHS sweeps 200 CDL schools as DMV employees, carriers targeted over unqualified drivers]
