7,000 Sham CDL Schools Shut Down. Their Graduates Are Still Driving.

Five people from Massachusetts burned to death on I-95 last Friday because a tour bus driver plowed into a work zone at highway speed without touching the brakes. Two of them were children, a 13-year-old and a 7-year-old. Jing Sheng Dong, the driver, got his commercial driver's license in New York in 2024 from a school called "7 CDL Driving School," which is now under federal investigation.^[1] He reportedly does not speak English.^[2]

The Department of Transportation had to subpoena the New York DMV to get Dong's training records because the state allegedly refused to hand them over.^[1] That subpoena, which threatens criminal contempt for noncompliance, was issued while a Stafford County grand jury indicted Dong on five counts of involuntary manslaughter and a charge of reckless driving.^[2] The Acura carrying the two children caught fire after being crushed between the bus and a Suburban. Four of the five dead were inside it.

This is what the output of a CDL mill looks like.

Since 2025, FMCSA has yanked more than 7,000 training schools from the national Training Provider Registry.^[3] A five-day enforcement blitz in February 2026 sent 300 investigators into 1,426 schools across all 50 states. They found instructors who didn't hold the correct licenses for the vehicles they were teaching people to drive, schools operating from fake addresses, and training programs that never tested students on basic safety requirements, let alone hazardous materials transport. One shuttered school had been training school bus drivers.^[4]

When 109 of those schools learned investigators were on their way, they voluntarily withdrew from the registry before anyone walked through the door.^[3] That number deserves a second read. A hundred and nine training providers, each one responsible for certifying that human beings are qualified to operate 40-ton vehicles on public highways, heard the feds were coming and preemptively surrendered their credentials. Not because they were confident they'd pass inspection. Because they knew they wouldn't.

The body count math is straightforward but FMCSA has never attempted it. In 2024, 5,340 people died in large-truck crashes, a 30% increase over the previous decade.^[5] Seventy percent of those dead were not in the truck. They were in sedans, minivans, SUVs, and Acuras with children in the backseat. Nobody tracks which of those fatal crashes involved a driver who graduated from a sham school, because the federal system treats a CDL as a CDL regardless of where it came from, and FMCSA doesn't retroactively audit the licenses issued by schools it later removes.

That's the gap: the enforcement removed 7,000 schools from the pipeline but did not remove a single graduate from the road.

A parallel problem runs alongside the training fraud. A FreightWaves investigation in early 2026 documented at least 11,000 potentially fraudulent Clearinghouse clearances issued by unqualified Substance Abuse Professionals who returned CDL holders to active duty without clinical credentials, without treatment programs, and in most documented cases, without ever administering a drug test.^[6] Against the 85,136 total negative return-to-duty results in FMCSA's December 2025 data, roughly one in eight may be fake. These are CDL holders who failed drug tests, were "cleared" by people with no medical qualifications, and went back behind the wheel the same week.

The training pipeline is broken at the entrance and the exit.

What you can do

If you're booking a charter bus or hiring a commercial carrier, look up the company on FMCSA's SAFER system before your family gets on board. Check the carrier's crash history, safety rating, and inspection results. If you're sharing a highway with a truck and traffic slows suddenly ahead of a work zone, get out of the travel lane. FMCSA's crackdown caught 7,000 schools but Dong got his CDL two years before the sting, and he was driving a bus full of passengers last Friday. The next driver trained at a fake address using the wrong vehicle by an unlicensed instructor is already on the road, and enforcement will catch up eventually, but whether it catches up before the next I-95 depends on whether anyone revokes the credentials the mills already issued.

Nobody at FMCSA has announced plans to do that.

Source: NHTSA FARS 2014–2023, FMCSA Training Provider Registry enforcement actions, NSC Injury Facts 2024. Large-truck crash fatality counts use NHTSA definitions (GVWR >10,000 lbs), which include some noncommercial heavy vehicles. CDL mill removal counts are cumulative FMCSA figures; not all removed schools were actively fraudulent. See methodology for caveats.