Overseas interests have been messing with truckers’ logs, and Congress just decided that’s enough.
Phantom ELD Editors
On June 21, U.S. Representatives Greg Steube (R-Fla.) and Dave Taylor (R-Ohio) introduced the GHOSTRUCK Act, a piece of legislation with a name almost as memorable as the problem it’s trying to fix. The full title is Guarding Hours-of-Service Oversight and Stopping Tampering by Remote Unofficial Carrier Keeper, and it tells you everything you need to know. Foreign-based dispatchers, often operating out of Eastern Europe and Asia, have been remotely editing Electronic Logging Device records for American truck drivers. Falsifying logs. Pushing drivers past legal hours-of-service limits. And when tragedies happen, they’re nowhere to be found.
“Foreign dispatchers should not be able to manipulate trucking safety records from halfway around the world and put American lives at risk.” – Rep. Greg Steube
Under current law, there’s no clear prohibition stopping someone sitting in an office overseas from annotating a driver’s ELD records. The GHOSTRUCK Act closes that loophole. If passed, any edit or annotation to an ELD record could only be made by a carrier, dispatcher, or driver physically located in North America. The driver would still retain final approval on all edits, a protection that already exists but is meaningless when the person making the change is beyond the reach of U.S. accountability.
Rep. Dave Taylor, Chairman of the Congressional Trucking Caucus, put it plainly: “Our nation’s truck drivers share the road with American families, and there’s nothing more important than ensuring everyone reaches their destinations safely.” Rep. Steube was less diplomatic, and rightly so: “Foreign dispatchers should not be able to manipulate trucking safety records from halfway around the world and put American lives at risk.”
Support for the GHOSTRUCK Act
The bill has drawn a strong show of industry support, with the National and State-level Trucking Associations signing on. Alex Rosen, ATA’s Senior VP of Legislative Affairs, called out the core issue directly: this isn’t an abstract policy debate. “Tampering with electronic logs is a growing problem that undermines enforcement, rewards bad actors, and puts the motoring public at risk.”
A Part of the Plan
The GHOSTRUCK Act doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It lands squarely inside a larger, coordinated push to clean up the trucking industry that state and national associations have been building. The Trucking Association Executives Council (TAEC), the national body of state trucking association leaders, published a comprehensive plan — available at truckingresurgence.com — called “The Fight for Fairness and Safety: Paving the Way for a Trucking Resurgence.” One of its seven pillars is dedicated entirely to strengthening electronic log integrity. The plan states plainly that “law enforcement reports that ELD manipulation is a large and increasing problem” and calls for ending the self-certification system for ELD providers, requiring independent third-party testing, mandating routine forensic audits of ELD systems, and establishing automatic decertification thresholds for providers with substantiated complaints.
The GHOSTRUCK Act is a step toward making sure that when something goes wrong, somebody answers for it. The Alabama Trucking Association supports efforts at every level of government to protect professional drivers, create a fair and level playing field across the industry, and hold bad actors accountable.
