U.S. Legislative Updates

On July 6, President Obama signed into law a long-term highway bill. The legislation allows more than $100 billion to be spent on highway, mass transit and other transportation programs over the next two years. Funding for the projects would have expired on June 30.


A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee held a congressional hearing on July 11, 2012, to examine the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) handling of fraud in the production and trade of Renewable Identification Numbers, or "RINs," which serve as credits for the production and blending of renewable fuels and are used for compliance purposes under EPA’s Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) regulations. According to the subcommittee, over the course of the past year, the production of and trade in fraudulent or invalid RINs has emerged as a significant problem within the market for biomass-based diesel (biodiesel) fuels, which by volume is second in size only to conventional ethanol fuels production. Unlike ethanol RINs, which trade for around two cents each, biodiesel RINs have traded for upwards of $1.50 each and have served to help make the biodiesel market economically viable and competitive, especially for smaller producers and biodiesel blenders, such as truck stops. The relatively high price for RINs, however, has also attracted fraud, according to the subcommittee.


On July 11, 2012, the House Committee on Small Business conducted a congressional hearing to examine the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) program and its effects on small businesses. The CSA is the federal government’s primary tool to regulate commercial motor vehicle safety. Since the initial implementation of the program in 2010, a number of small businesses in the highway commercial freight industry have identified a variety of issues that they believe call into question the overall accuracy of the program, as well create disparate effects on small businesses.

Committee Chairman Sam Graves (R-MO) acknowledged the contribution of small businesses to the trucking industry and the importance of identifying and correcting major gaps in the safety rating system: "These flaws call into question not only the ability of the CSA to achieve its primary goal -- to identify unsafe actors that cause highway accidents -- but also whether, in too many instances, the new system is identifying safe operators as unsafe.

"Of particular concern to the committee are the significant adverse consequences that the inaccurate safety scores may have on trucking companies, 97 percent of which are small businesses."