Pink Cheetah and Drivers want broker transparency. After being on all sides and seeing that carriers leasing on owner-operators rip off far more drivers than brokers ever will, I have to ask: Say you win. FMCSA publishes the rule, the waiver clauses die, and the rate confirmation between the broker and the shipper lands in your inbox 48 hours after delivery. You open it and find out you hauled a load for 58% of what the shipper paid. Now what? Trucking has no rate regulation. A broker is entitled to whatever margin it can negotiate. You are holding a number, and a number is not a cause of action. Meanwhile, the regulation that carries a private right of action, statutory damages, and attorney fees has been on the books since the Carter administration, and the drivers who hold that right mostly don’t know it exists.

What the fight is actually over

49 CFR 371.3 requires a property broker to keep a record of each transaction, and it says each party to a brokered transaction has the right to review that record. That language has been on the books for decades. In practice, it’s dead law. Brokers evade it two ways. They write a waiver of 371.3 rights into the carrier agreement as a condition of getting the load, or they simply decline to produce the records and dare the carrier to do something about it.

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association and the Small Business in Transportation Coalition petitioned FMCSA in 2020 to fix it. The agency sought comment on those petitions Aug. 19, 2020, at 85 FR 51145. The Transportation Intermediaries Association filed a counter-petition asking FMCSA to eliminate 371.3(c) entirely, arguing the 1980 market conditions that justified the rule no longer exist. FMCSA granted the carrier petitions in March 2023 and rejected TIA’s. It published a notice of proposed rulemaking Nov. 20, 2024, under docket FMCSA-2023-0257 and RIN 2126-AC63, drawing close to 7,000 comments. Then the administration changed, and instead of finalizing that version, DOT started over.

The replacement has slipped from May 2026 to July 2026 and has now cleared FMCSA and gone to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for White House review. The text stays confidential until it is published. It’s a supplemental notice; it reopens public comment, which puts an enforceable final rule a full comment cycle and another round of review past whenever that text drops.

If the November 2024 version survives in substance, brokers would keep transaction records electronically, produce a copy within 48 hours of a carrier or shipper’s request, and lose the ability to contract around the right.

That is a real improvement, and I support it. It is also not what most of the people cheering for it think it is.

The case that proved the gap

Pink Cheetah hauled a load of ice cream for Total Quality Logistics in January 2023. Afterward, owner Dakota Springfields requested TQL’s transaction records under 371.3. TQL refused, pointing to section 4(c) of its broker-carrier agreement: the broker is not required to disclose its charges to customers, commissions, or brokerage revenue, and the carrier waives its right to receive, audit, or review the information and documents required under 49 CFR 371.3.

Springfields complained to the Secretary of Transportation in October 2023. FMCSA investigated and emailed TQL on Nov. 30, 2023, telling it to remove the waiver language and comply with the regulation. TQL ignored the email and blocked her from further communication.

She sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. She relied on 49 U.S.C. 14704(a)(1), which permits a civil action when a broker does not obey an order of the Secretary. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan dismissed the case Sept. 12, 2025, holding that the FMCSA email was informal guidance and not an enforceable order. She appealed, and the D.C. Circuit heard oral argument Sept. 11, 2026.

She had the right. She had the agency on her side. The agency put it in writing. She still lost because she needed an order, and what she had was correspondence. The regulation gave her standing to ask and nothing to enforce.

The honest inventory

Here is what 371.3 records get you. It’s not much.

They do not get you a better rate. There is no rate regulation in trucking, and there has not been since deregulation. A broker is entitled to whatever spread it can negotiate. Learning that the spread was 42% gives you no claim, because taking a 42% margin is not a violation of anything. The transparency-equals-fair-rates argument is the weakest version of the case, and it is the one that gets made most often.

The records actually prove what happened after something went wrong.

They prove the shipper paid the broker, which is your documentation for a claim against the BMC-84 surety. That matters more now than it did two years ago, because the broker and freight forwarder financial responsibility rule took full effect on Jan. 16, 2026, and the agency suspends authority when available security falls below $75,000 and is not replenished within seven days.

They prove whether your load was re-brokered and who actually got paid, which is the evidence base for the fastest-moving fraud vector in the market.

They answer whether the shipper already paid the broker, which often determines whether you have any path at the shipper for unpaid freight charges when a broker folds.

They show what the shipper actually authorized on detention, layover, and truck ordered not used, versus what the broker told you was authorized.

That is a genuine list. Notice that every item on it is forensic. Transparency is an evidence right, not a price right. It improves your position after you have already been hurt.

The regulation with a check attached

I would argue considerably more money is being taken on the other side of the same transaction. 49 CFR Part 376 governs leased equipment. Under 376.12(g), when a driver’s compensation is based on a percentage of the revenue for a shipment, the lease must give that driver the right to see the documents showing what the carrier was actually paid for the load. That is a percentage-of-revenue disclosure right. It is closer to what carriers have spent 40 years demanding from brokers than anything 371.3 has ever delivered.

The difference that matters is what happens when it is violated. 49 U.S.C. 14704(a)(2) provides an express private right of action for damages for violations of Part B; courts have applied it to leasing violations, and 14704(e) makes attorney fees available to a prevailing party.

Broader disclosure right, express damages remedy, fee shifting. That last piece is what makes a case economically viable for a plaintiff’s firm to take on contingency, which is the difference between a right that exists on paper and a right that gets enforced. You can watch the difference play out in the dockets. The Super Ego Holding class action, filed in August 2022 in the Northern District of Illinois, involves a potential class estimated at 10,000 to 20,000 drivers. The complaint alleges drivers were promised 88% of gross revenue and received falsified rate confirmations showing lower amounts, were overcharged for fuel, and paid for insurance that was voidable because they were dispatched under a different authority than the one named on the policy. Tsybikov v. Dovgal, a federal complaint in the Sam Express orbit, describes the same structure: the same 88% promise, $14,000 in fuel deductions exceeding what was physically possible for the miles driven, a 12% dispatch fee for services never independently provided, and $250 per pay period for voidable coverage.

Those are 376.12(g) cases. A percentage-of-revenue lease and a falsified document showing what the carrier was paid is the exact violation the regulation was written to catch, and the statute hands the driver a damages claim for it. One carrier suing one broker over one load of ice cream died on a threshold question. Meanwhile, the same underlying grievance, misstated revenue on a percentage deal, is running as class litigation with five figures of potential plaintiffs because somebody pleaded it under the statute that has teeth.

Why nobody uses it

Three reasons, and none of them are legal.

Most leased owner-operators have never read Part 376 and have no idea 376.12(g) exists. Enforcement of the leasing rules is complaint-driven, and you cannot complain about a right you do not know you hold. The drivers who would bring the claim are the ones least able to bring it. A man netting $900 a week after deductions does not have a retainer, and until a firm sees enough plaintiffs to justify the work, nobody is fronting the cost.

The carrier holds the load board. A driver who audits his settlements gets the bad freight next week. That leverage doesn’t exist in the broker relationship, which is why the broker fight is louder: a carrier can pick a fight with a broker and book a load somewhere else that afternoon. A leased driver cannot.

The right you already have

The most powerful thing in this discussion isn’t a regulation. It is the word no. The spot market is voluntary. Nobody makes you take the load. If the rate is insulting, the answer is to leave it on the board, and a rate nobody hauls gets repriced by Thursday.

That is true; it always has been, and it answers “what does transparency get you?” It gets you a better-informed refusal. Which is worth something, but only to a carrier who can afford to refuse. That is exactly what the lease model is engineered to take away.

A driver in a predatory lease-purchase cannot say no. The truck payment comes out of the settlement whether the wheels turn or not. The insurance deduction, the escrow, the maintenance reserve, the dispatch fee, all of it accrues while the truck sits. Sitting costs more than rolling cheap. So he rolls cheap, and he keeps rolling cheap, and every week he rolls cheap, he is deeper into the arrangement that makes rolling cheap mandatory. That is the mechanism. Not the rate. The removal of the ability to decline a rate.

Which means the transparency fight and the lease fight are the same fight, and the industry has been running at them backward. Broker transparency gives carriers better information, even though they already had the power to walk. Part 376 enforcement would restore the power to walk to the drivers who lost it, and it already includes a damages remedy and fee shifting.

What to watch

The supplemental proposal is at OIRA. When the text publishes, the question isn’t whether it bans waivers, because it almost certainly will. The question is whether FMCSA attaches any enforcement mechanism that doesn’t require a carrier to first obtain an order from the Secretary and then sue to enforce it. If the final rule leaves the remedy where Pink Cheetah found it, brokers will comply on the easy requests and stonewall the ones that matter, and the only change will be that the refusal arrives electronically within 48 hours.

For owner-operators, the more useful move doesn’t require waiting on rulemaking at all. If you are leased on under a percentage-of-revenue arrangement, you already have a federal right to see what the carrier was paid for your load, and a federal cause of action if the number you were shown was false. Request it in writing. Keep the request and keep the response. That paper is worth considerably more than a rate confirmation from a broker because a statute backs it up.

The industry has to answer why it spent four decades fighting for the disclosure right with no remedy while the one with a remedy sat unused, and whether it will still be asking after the rule finally publishes.