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The Pool Is Getting Smaller

The Caviar Desk · April 1, 2026 · 5 min read

Happy April Fool's Day. The only fools today are the brokers who haven't seen OTR Solutions' announcement this week.

Chris Brewer of River City Logistics said it best: “OTR Solutions is giving us a real edge in this market.” More on that below.

Plus:

Indiana CDL Deadline Hit at Midnight
Freight Bankruptcies Keep Mounting
Iran Hit the U.S. Aluminum Supply Chain

💡

Question of the Day:

As of midnight Wednesday, Indiana revoked CDLs from an estimated ______ drivers.

🍳 What's Cookin' In Freight

🚨 Indiana CDL Deadline Hits 2,000 Drivers at Midnight. All commercial driver's licenses held by undocumented immigrants in Indiana expired at midnight Wednesday, unless those drivers could show one of three approved work visas. The Indiana Attorney General's office estimates roughly 2,000 CDL holders are affected. The law passed this in March, following several high-profile fatal crashes involving undocumented drivers in the state, and it includes a $50,000 fine for employers who knowingly hire drivers without legal status. Craig Fuller wrote on X: "Indianapolis is the 9th largest trucking market in the US. It is important to watch how this shapes freight markets in Indiana."

💸 Freight Bankruptcies Kept Mounting in March. Trucking carriers, a freight broker, an Amazon delivery contractor, and a marine operator all filed Chapter 11 in March, extending a wave of supply chain bankruptcies that started in January. Most of the trucking filers were small fleets, 8 to 23 drivers, carrying liabilities that dwarfed their assets. Cal Logistics Group, a freight brokerage, was also among the filers.

🏭 Iran Just Hit the U.S. Aluminum Supply Chain. Iran struck the two largest aluminum smelters in the Middle East over the weekend, hitting a combined 3.1 million tons of annual production capacity in the UAE and Bahrain. The U.S. imports 60% of its aluminum, and the Gulf region supplied 22% of that last year. London Metal Exchange aluminum prices jumped 6% on Monday to nearly $3,500 a ton, close to a four-year high. Analysts say capacity cannot be simply replaced.

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The Pool Is Getting Smaller

On March 30, OTR Solutions launched OTR Select, a capacity and rate intelligence platform built entirely on verified carrier data from OTR's factoring network.

They built OTR Select for exactly the market that is arriving now.

Three days earlier, Sean Duffy walked onto the floor of the Mid-America Trucking Show (MATS) unannounced and told 14,000 truckers exactly what's coming.

"We're going to systematically roll back the fraud, prosecute the fraud," Duffy said. "And I think what you're going to see is your spot rates are going to go up."

The crowd loved it. And honestly, he's probably right.

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy taking photos at last week's Mid-America Trucking Show (MATS) in Louisville, KY. Image source: Overdrive.

What he described as a win for trucking is also a direct change to the market in which brokers buy capacity.

FMCSA Administrator Derek Barrs, also at MATS, ran through the full enforcement picture: non-domiciled CDL crackdowns, English proficiency enforcement, CDL school audits and decertifications, and ELD vetting changes.

Nearly 3,000 CDL training providers have already been removed from the FMCSA Training Provider Registry. Another 4,500 are on notice.

The drivers they produced are being pulled from service, or they can't get licensed in the first place. The driver pool is shrinking, and it's not stopping.

It's a policy-driven, deliberate reduction in supply happening in real time, load by load, license by license.

When Duffy says spot rates are going up, he means carriers are regaining leverage.

For brokers, that means primary carriers rejecting more loads, spot searches going deeper and returning fewer clean options, and the quality of available capacity varying more widely than it has in years.

This is exactly the environment OTR Select was built for.

OTR Select's ad featured in the latest edition of FreightCaviar Print.

Built on millions of verified lane-level transactions and tens of thousands of continuously vetted carriers, the platform gives brokers access to real capacity and invoice-backed rate intelligence, not scraped data or self-reported availability.

Carriers surfaced by real freight history and live location signals. Rate intelligence built on actual transactions.

"OTR Select delivers what the freight market has been missing — trusted capacity and rate intelligence built on real transactions from premium carriers," said Clayton Griffin, President of OTR Solutions.

When carriers regain leverage, they run their best freight with the partners they already trust.

If you're a broker, worth checking out how OTR Select could help you navigate the changing trucking landscape and secure vetted capacity through OTR's network of 20,000+ carriers.

🌎 Around the Freight Web

⛽ Diesel Is Setting All-Time Highs in Multiple States. Over the last month, the cost of diesel in Arizona rose 67%, in Nevada and North Carolina rose 58%, and in Tennessee and Louisiana rose 56%, all setting new all-time highs or the largest monthly increases ever.

📦 Amazon Freight Just Hit 80,000 Dry Van Trailers. A year ago, they had 70,000. Now 80,000, plus 24,000 intermodal containers. Amazon Freight is one of the largest trailer fleets in the country and continues to grow.

🧊 Tariffs Are Reshaping Cold Chains. 73% of cold chain decision-makers expect tariffs to keep hurting their finances this year. Frozen food demand is up, and border corridor complexity is growing.

🍽️ Sysco Just Bought Your Restaurant Depot Lanes. Sysco is acquiring Jetro Restaurant Depot for $29.1 billion, folding 166 warehouses across 35 states into the largest food distributor in America.

⚖️ Trucking Groups Move to Slam the Entry Door. FMCSA audits less than a quarter of new motor carriers in their first year. OOIDA and ATA want Congress to fix that before the next chameleon carrier causes a crash.