Deregulation: When Less Is More

Government has a habit of piling things on.

New rules stacked on top of old rules. Paper manuals for devices that live online. Certifications for things that already have five other certifications. At some point, it stops being about safety or efficiency — and just becomes noise.

So when the Department of Transportation recently announced 52 deregulatory actions — deleting over 73,000 words of federal code — it felt like a rare breath of fresh air. Not because regulation is bad. It's not. But because it was long overdue to ask a basic question:

Is this actually helping anyone?

Take one rule they scrapped: drivers used to have to carry a printed manual for their electronic logging device in the cab — even though the same manual is available online, on the device itself. That’s not safety. That’s just busywork.

Or the rule requiring trailers made before 1993 to be retrofitted with reflective tape — even though most of those trailers are long gone. Who exactly was that helping?

This isn’t about politics. It’s about common sense.

We’ve seen the same thing in our own work. At Drive, we’re building software for trucking companies that cuts through the clutter. Most of the platforms out there? Bloated. Overbuilt. Packed with features no one uses and forms no one understands. It’s like they were designed to impress a compliance officer instead of actually help.

So we took a different approach: strip it down to what matters. Help teams move faster, stay safer, and see the road ahead more clearly. Fewer steps. Fewer screens. More signal, less noise.

What the DOT did last week wasn’t perfect — nothing ever is — but it pointed in the right direction. It reminded us that the goal isn’t just to add. Sometimes the most meaningful progress comes from removing what’s in the way.

That’s the kind of progress we can get behind.  If you want to see the full list of what got tossed, trimmed, or rewritten — here’s the source material straight from the Department of Transportation. It’s a long read, but if you care about how policy shapes the road ahead, it’s worth a skim.