The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) updated its system used to track commercial truckers’ safety compliance records for the first time in 25 years, the agency’s acting chief technology officer (CTO) said Thursday morning.
Speaking at the ATARC Public Sector CIO Summit in Reston, Va., Ankur Saini said that the update to the Department of Transportation’s system created a “one-stop shop” for commercial truckers looking to register for a unique identifier – known as a USDOT Number, which is used to track a company’s safety record, compliance, and insurance. The unique identifier is required for interstate commerce.
“On Monday, we launched the modernized origin of that system for the very first time ever,” Saini said. “It’s a big deal.”
He explained that modernization at FMCSA is about upgrading, rather than needing to constantly rip and replace every five years as the technology landscape rapidly evolves.
Instead, FMCSA is looking at more efficient ways to modernize systems using the tools at its disposal – such as cloud computing and agentic artificial intelligence, Saini said.
The agency’s infrastructure is entirely hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), according to Saini. Although the agency is not yet fully leveraging all of AWS’s benefits, he said its autoscaling capabilities have been essential to modernization efforts.
The upgraded system created for truckers’ USDOT Number registration is called Modus, and it unifies systems that are typically siloed. It also includes automated identity and business verification.
These processes seek to address an increase in fraud in trucking, Saini said.
“Cargo theft has gone up like 600% … over the last few years, and as our head of the registration program will tell you today, using the system that we had, your dog could register as a trucking company – that’s how open the system is. We’re putting an end to that,” Saini said.