In May, the American Trucking Associations’ board of directors unanimously voted to extend the contract of current ATA President and CEO Chris Spear through 2029. The ATA, in a news release, cited Spear’s efficacy in advancing the legislative agenda of its membership as the reason behind his tenure extension.
But looking at public statements from both the ATA and Spear himself, it is less than clear that the ATA is an effective advocate for its membership.
Take, for example, an April 2023 press release in which the ATA highlights four pieces of legislation recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, bills on which the ATA “worked closely” with Congress to promote.
Of the four bills, the first has come the closest to becoming law. H.R. 2830, or the Veteran Improvement Commercial Driver License Act of 2023, is intended to expand the use of veteran educational benefits under the GI Bill such that they might be applied to new CDL training programs. The text of this bill was ultimately packaged into a more expansive one, H.R. 5914, which passed the House and sits before the Senate at the time of writing.
The remaining three pieces of legislation have not fared quite as well. H.R. 3013, or the License Act, is in limbo after being reported out of committee in May 2023. Since the bill is intended to rectify the shortage of truckload drivers — an oft-repeated myth of the ATA, and one for which the organization’s projections are revised frequently — there is no real urgency behind its advancement.
H.R. 2936, or the Highway Accident Fairness Act, faces a difficult road ahead without the advocacy of its primary sponsor: Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas. Cuellar and his wife were indicted in May on federal charges of conspiracy, money laundering and bribery. Cuellar, a Mexican-American native of Laredo, Texas, is alleged to have accepted $600,000 in bribes from two foreign entities, one of which is an energy company wholly owned by the government of Azerbaijan. Cuellar is the co-chair of the Congressional Azerbaijan Caucus and has been a vocal advocate for Azerbaijan in recent years.
Incidentally, Cuellar is a major beneficiary of Truck PAC, the ATA’s political action committee. Since the 2008 election cycle, he has received contributions from Truck PAC totaling $44,000 — including at least $5,000 since a 2022 FBI raid on his home in connection with the federal probe into Azerbaijani money laundering.
Regardless of Cuellar’s future in Congress, H.R. 2936 has succumbed to inertia: No further action has been taken on it since it was referred to committee in April 2023.
Finally, H.R. 2948, or the CARS Act, was reported out of committee in May 2023. While this action implies that the bill might be considered by the House of Representatives, it escaped committee only by a narrow margin of 30-29, casting doubt on its appeal before the broader legislature.
Based on its results this Congress, the American Trucking Associations’ lobbying efforts make it look less like a Machiavellian operator, pulling strings in the halls of power, and more like another Washington grifter — a shop that raises a lot of money, pays its staff well and takes congresspeople to dinner, but gets little done.
Which carriers does the ATA truly represent?
In remarks before the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure in February 2023, Spear championed legislative efforts — such as the Truck Parking Safety Improvement Act — that have languished in Congress since.
Moreover, he restated the ATA’s opposition to the timeline proposed in California’s Advanced Clean Fleets (ACF) rule. The ACF rule sets a number of milestones toward the transition to zero-emission vehicles of all commercial fleets operating within the state, with the goal of 100% adoption by 2042. And while affiliates of the ATA, like the Nebraska Trucking Association, have brought a lawsuit against the California Air Resources Board seeking injunctive relief from the ACF rule, it is doubtful that this suit will succeed.
For one, many of the arguments made in the suit resemble those made in a rejected attempt to block California’s controversial independent contractor law, AB5. Another ruling, Ohio v. the Environmental Protection Agency, upheld a waiver granted by the EPA to California so that the state could set more stringent emissions standards than the federal government.
Should this attempt to seek injunctive relief from California’s emissions standards fail — which, at the time of writing, appears more probable than not — it would not be the first time that Spears and the ATA had their legislative ambitions frustrated.
In a 2017 interview with CNBC, Spear voiced opposition to the Affordable Care Act (ACA; commonly known as “Obamacare”) and support for the American Health Care Act, an effort to “repeal and replace” the ACA. Yet not only did this attempt founder in the Senate, many Republican critics of the ACA have since given up on all efforts to repeal and replace the ACA.
Even the legislative battles that the ATA openly touts as major victories are not so.
In a 2021 annual report on the activities of Truck PAC, the ATA congratulates itself on “staving off” the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. Yet not only is the PRO Act alive in both chambers of Congress, Vermont recently passed a state-specific version of the legislation.
The ATA expresses its fealty to large motor carriers most nakedly when it opposes legislative reform that would benefit owner-operators and company drivers. Last November, measures were proposed in both the House and Senate to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, repealing the section that currently prohibits truck drivers from receiving overtime pay.
Spear’s logic for opposing these measures is, to put it mildly, difficult to follow. He claims that the introduction of overtime pay, which entitles workers to receive 1.5 times their hourly wage for work beyond 40 hours per week, “would reduce drivers’ paychecks.” Not only is this claim counterintuitive, it fails to be supported elsewhere in the statement.
Spear goes on to celebrate the average salary of truck drivers; the ATA estimates it to be $70,000, though the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts it closer to $55,000.
Strangely enough, Spear also claims that “the bill would not affect owner-operators.” While this reasoning might seem self-evident at first glance, a spokesperson for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association disagreed, stating: “Higher wages for company drivers would have the downstream effect of raising compensation of all drivers.”
Given the heavy degree of fragmentation within the trucking industry, carrier rates and wages are highly sensitive to shifts in the fundamentals of supply and demand. OOIDA’s notion here that a rising tide lifts all boats is thus perfectly sensible.
What is less sensible is why the ATA, with Spear at its helm, has continually proved itself to be a menace to owner-operators and other small carriers, despite claiming to represent everyone from enterprise carriers to “small mom-and-pop operations.” The ATA’s sporadic legislative wins — which often present a dubious portrait of the group’s actual influence — appear to benefit small carriers only incidentally.
Where the ATA’s money goes
Although the ATA’s impact on legislation has been minimal during Spear’s tenure as president and chief executive officer, changes in the ATA’s finances are more evident.
First, Spear’s salary has dramatically increased since he took the top job at the ATA in 2017. That year, he earned $854,000 in total compensation, a substantial salary for the head of an organization that generated $42.96 million in total revenue. But five years later, Spear’s salary had increased by more than a million dollars to $1.982 million in 2022. Meanwhile, by 2022, the ATA’s total revenue had grown to $48.75 million. While his organization’s total revenue grew by 13.4% over the five-year period, Spear’s salary grew by 132%, or 10 times faster.
Spear’s annual compensation of nearly $2 million is high, especially for the trucking industry, a volatile, thin-margin business where even the chief executives of publicly traded carriers may earn less. In 2023, Mike Gerdin, CEO of Heartland Express, took home $1.01 million; David Parker, the chairman and CEO of Covenant Logistics, earned $1.3 million; and Richard O’Dell, the CEO of the newly public Proficient Auto Logistics, will take a base salary of $650,000.
There have been other dramatic changes to the American Trucking Associations’ finances: moving into a swanky new headquarters on the eighth floor of 80 M St., which bills itself as Washington’s first mass timber building, ballooned the organization’s liabilities from $28 million in 2020 to $91 million in 2022. ATA’s assets increased by a similar amount, presumably due to its ownership of the new office, but its debt ratio has steadily increased and its net assets have bled down from roughly $23 million in 2017 to $18.1 million in 2022.
Looking at the whole organization, then, the ATA is growing revenue slowly but rapidly increasing the salary of its CEO and its total liabilities, while drawing down its net assets.
There are other ways the ATA raises and spends money on politics, though: Truck PAC is one of them. The ATA spends about $1 million per year, and all of its expenditures are a matter of public record. But it’s somewhat difficult to discern a clear strategy.
Truck PAC says its mission is to “help elect federal candidates, regardless of party affiliation, who understand our issues and support the trucking industry,” and indeed, the PAC writes small checks to more than 100 individual congresspeople.
So far in the 2024 election cycle, Truck PAC has spent about $714,000, with approximately 60% going to Republican politicians and 37% going to Democratic politicians. Even though the ATA donates mostly to Republicans, the party that currently controls the House, it can’t get the House to vote on most of its bills.
As required by statute, these checks are small — a PAC can only directly give a candidate’s campaign $5,000 per election (for a total of $10,000 for a primary-general election cycle) — and spread around. In effect, Truck PAC writes $5,000 checks to every congressperson directly or indirectly touching transportation and a bunch of others besides: “spray and pray” as a legislative strategy.
Truck PAC cuts a few larger checks to other political action committees, like the $20,000 it donated to House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s Scalise Leadership Fund and the $15,000 it gave to former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy’s McCarthy Victory Fund, as well as contributions to PACs affiliated with Democrats including Sens. Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin and Ron Wyden, and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries.
Time is running out on the 118th Congress, and Spear has little to show for this cycle except a defeat at the hands of President Joe Biden’s EPA. Next year is highly uncertain, given the volatile presidential race and the Democrats’ razor-thin margin in the Senate — one wonders how Spear will justify his salary to his membership if the ATA’s results don’t improve.