MAGA Conservatives, Unions Want To Crush Driverless Trucks. Will the Trump Administration Listen?
A fight over an arcane trucking safety rule reveals the White House's split position on autonomous vehicle regulations.
Earlier this week, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) said he planned on introducing a bill requiring that autonomous vehicles always have a human operator in them, a measure the senator says is necessary to protect the jobs of truck drivers.
Driverless cars are "not safe" and "would be terrible, terrible for working people," said Hawley to Business Insider on Tuesday.
A draft of his proposed legislation would require a "human safety operator" behind the wheel at all times.
Similar bills pushed by the Teamsters union at the state level have been unsuccessful, even in liberal states where unions hold more influence over policymakers.
As it stands, Hawley and the Teamsters don't need to proactively pass any new policies to stop autonomous trucks.
Federal regulations requiring that warning devices, like flares or safety cones, be placed around disabled commercial trucks on public roads already act as a de facto ban on fully autonomous trucking.
The Biden administration refused autonomous vehicle companies' request for a waiver of those regulations in December 2024.
Those hoping the new administration might take a more hands-off approach to autonomous vehicle regulations have meanwhile received mixed signals from the White House.
Last week, U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Sean Duffy announced that highway safety regulators would begin the process of updating federal rules to enable the growth of the autonomous vehicle industry.
"The rules of the road need to be updated to fit the realities of the 21st century. Our changes will eliminate redundant requirements and bring us closer to a single national standard that spurs innovation and prioritizes safety," said Duffy.
At the same time, the Trump administration's DOT has continued its predecessor's policy of refusing to grant waivers of the warning device rule and has continued to fight a lawsuit from autonomous trucking companies challenging the denial of their requested waiver to that rule.
Back in 2023, driverless truck operator Aurora and Waymo's driverless truck division jointly petitioned the Biden administration for an exemption to the warning device rule. The companies proposed an alternative standard that would allow them to use cab-mounted warning lights instead of road-placed warning devices.
In support of their waiver request, the two companies submitted their own studies showing that drivers reacted similarly to currently required road-placed warning devices and their proposed flashing warning beacons.
The Waymo study also found that drivers subjectively preferred the cab-mounted warning beacons.
A collection of trade associations, trucking companies, and equipment manufacturers submitted comments in support of Waymo and Aurora's waiver request.
Opposing the companies' request were mostly trade unions representing transportation workers, who uniformly argued that warning beacons were an inferior alternative to the current requirements.
In its last month in office, the Biden administration sided with the unions and denied Aurora and Waymo's waiver request.
Their request "does not demonstrate how Applicants or other proposed exempted parties would ensure an equivalent or greater level of safety than would be achieved absent the exemption," said the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) in its waiver denial.
Ironically enough, a few weeks after the FMCSA denied that waiver, the agency announced it would perform its own study to evaluate "whether warning devices meaningfully influence crash-relevant aspects of human performance in the presence of a parked or disabled commercial motor vehicle."
"The reason for denying Aurora and Waymo's petition was that they didn't have any evidence that it would be an equivalent level of safety or better. But then they say the existing standard doesn't have any evidence to support it," says Marc Scribner, a transportation policy researcher at the Reason Foundation (which publishes this magazine).
Scribner suggests that the warning device rule might even reduce safety over warning beacons, given that it can potentially require truck drivers to be in moving traffic when placing warning devices on the road.
Aurora has made this same argument in the lawsuit it filed against the DOT in January 2025.
"When the applicable regulations were promulgated over 50 years ago, no actual safety data was presented to support the safety benefit of the specified human-placed warning devices," reads the petition. "In assessing whether [cab-mounted warning beacons] are at least 'equivalent' to the driver-placed warnings, the actual data provided by the Applicants far exceeds what FMCSA has admitted about the agency's existing requirements."
The Biden administration's waiver denial was widely seen as a favor to the drivers' unions, most prominently the Teamsters. It was one of many decisions the last White House made rejecting any regulatory changes that might allow the deployment of labor-saving technology in the transportation sector.
One might assume a Republican administration would look more favorably on such technology. The second Trump administration is a little more complicated.
Teamsters' head Sean O'Brien spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2024, and the union famously did not endorse Kamala Harris—a break from its traditional practice of stumping for Democratic presidential candidates.
Lobbying disclosures show that the Teamsters have also been lobbying the Trump administration's DOT on "commercial motor vehicle automation" issues.
It's possible then that their influence has pushed the administration, which has otherwise been supportive of new technologies like artificial intelligence and automation, to stick by the warning device rule.
While Aurora's lawsuit was filed against the Biden administration, the Trump administration has notably continued to litigate it in court.
There are some signs that a settlement agreement in that case is in the offing. Aurora and the administration have repeatedly asked the court to delay filing deadlines, which could indicate they're trying to work out a deal.
Autonomous vehicle industry advocates are optimistic that the current administration will ultimately come down on the side of encouraging the new industry.
"We're very hopeful that the Department of Transportation, under the leadership of Secretary Duffy, is going to make the right decision here," says Jeff Farrah, CEO of the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association. "We need to make sure the regulatory structure is in place so that these companies can pour investment into the economy."
In addition to the rule making that Duffy announced last week, the latest "unified agenda of regulatory and deregulatory actions" says the administration will seek to amend motor carrier safety regulations to "ensure the safe introduction of automated driving systems" on commercial vehicles.
The notice does not list specific rules that it would amend. There's a long list of regulations that reference human drivers that could trip up autonomous vehicles.
Fixing all of them will take a long time, however. Updating federal regulations to accommodate driverless commercial vehicles was a process that started in the first Trump administration. The DOT doesn't anticipate even releasing proposed new regulations until May 2026.
In the meantime, autonomous vehicle technology has progressed rapidly.
While a more comprehensive rule change is in the making, Scribner says the administration could take immediate action to grant waivers to the warning device rule, which he says is the most immediate barrier to commercial autonomous vehicles.
A settlement agreement that grants Aurora and other companies a waiver from the warning device rule in exchange for collecting data on the efficacy of warning beacons would be a meaningful step toward encouraging the safe rollout of new technology, he says.
