Your broker liability shield just fell — and carrier vetting is now a forensic standard, not a checkbox

Week of June 25, 2026 · 3 items · 4-minute read

1. The Supreme Court just removed the broker liability shield — “reasonable care” is now a forensic standard

On May 22, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II that state negligent-carrier-selection claims against freight brokers are not preempted by federal law. For years the Carmack Amendment and the FAAAA gave brokers a preemption shield against state negligence claims; that shield is gone. A broker — or any party arranging transportation it does not itself operate — can now be sued directly for damages when it fails to exercise reasonable care in selecting a carrier. The shift that matters for procurement: “reasonable care” is being read as a forensic standard, not an intent-based one. Periodic onboarding checks no longer discharge the duty — courts will look for screening at each load assignment, with court-admissible, time-stamped documentation of every verification.

So what: if your sourcing chain uses brokers, 3PLs, or arranges-but-doesn’t-operate carriers anywhere, confirm that carrier vetting happens per load and is documented in a form you could hand a court — not a once-a-year vendor-onboarding PDF. The cheap version of this is a verification trail you build now; the expensive version is discovery after a loss. Treat broker contracts as a place where this liability can land on you, and price it.

2. A White House executive order put criminal teeth behind chain-wide enforcement

On June 3, 2026, a White House executive order extended enforcement obligations across the entire logistics chain, with criminal-prosecution authority aimed at forced labor, worker misclassification, cargo undervaluation, and illegal transshipment. This is the enforcement complement to item 1: the Court widened who can sue you, and the executive branch widened what gets prosecuted and how far down the chain it reaches. The exposure is no longer just a civil damages number — misclassification and undervaluation in a tier-2 or tier-3 supplier can now pull your organization into a criminal-enforcement posture, not just a contract dispute.

So what: map where forced-labor, misclassification, undervaluation, and transshipment risk actually live in your supplier base — including the carriers and forwarders your brokers select on your behalf — and confirm you have continuous OFAC/BIS-style screening, not a point-in-time check. Confirm the EO’s specific scope against the primary source before you brief leadership, but get the exposure map queued now: the parties that document continuous compliance first are the ones who can prove reasonable care when the standard is tested.

3. The federal carrier-data layer is thinning while audits spike — and the industry is publicly admitting it can’t vet carriers

Read in isolation, FMCSA’s recent deregulatory moves — rolling back rules it calls redundant, moving to eliminate certain CDL-violation self-reporting — sound like relief. Read next to items 1 and 2, they’re the opposite: the federal government is reducing the very carrier-compliance data you now need to defend a “reasonable care” selection, at the exact moment the legal duty to perform that selection moved onto you. And three things this month show the gap is real and widening, not theoretical:

Enforcement is spiking, not easing. A North Carolina trucking group is investigating a wave of unexpected FMCSA audits, and a Montana CMV inspection blitz pulled unsafe equipment off the road in the same window. The audit drumbeat tells you which carriers are under scrutiny — but it lands on carriers, not on the buyer who now carries the selection duty.
The brokers themselves are admitting they can’t do this. In June 2026 the Transportation Intermediaries Association (TIA) petitioned FMCSA for a federal carrier-selection safety standard and for the agency to publish an official “high-risk carrier” list — explicitly because, by TIA’s own account, more than 90% of authorized motor carriers carry no formal safety rating at all. When the trade group representing the brokers tells the regulator that the data needed to vet a carrier doesn’t exist for nine carriers in ten, that is not a niche compliance footnote — that is the entire vetting problem stated out loud.

The strategic read: don’t wait for FMCSA to publish that list. Even if it does, a federal “high-risk” list is a lagging, lowest-common-denominator signal — and the 90% with no rating are exactly the carriers a buyer most needs a private opinion on.

So what: assume the federal carrier-data layer is getting less complete, not more, and build your carrier-selection evidence on sources you control — safety ratings where they exist, inspection and crash history, authority and insurance status, and your own per-load screening record — and treat “no safety rating” as an elevated-risk signal to investigate, not a silent pass. That is the single most common case (90%+), and it is precisely where a negligent-selection claim will probe hardest. Confirm the specific FMCSA rule changes and the TIA petition against the primary record before you brief leadership; but the strategic direction is clear, and the Court, the executive order, the audit wave, and the brokers’ own petition all point the same way: the duty to know your carrier is now yours to discharge and yours to prove.