On Monday, FreightWaves reported a number that should stop every small carrier mid-coffee: Landstar — one of the largest broker and agent networks in trucking — has removed more than 35,000 carriers from its approved network over four years. The pool has shrunk from over 100,000 approved carriers in the second quarter of 2022 to just over 64,000 in the second quarter of 2026, a 35% reduction — and it is still shrinking, down another 7% year over year.

Here is the part that matters: Landstar did not announce this as a cutback. It announced it as an achievement. “We’re always looking for opportunities to drive safety, security, and service,” said Matt Miller, the company’s vice president and chief safety and operations officer, describing a program of enhanced vetting technology, identity checks, and stricter compliance measures originally aimed at cargo theft and freight fraud. Landstar is not an outlier. It is simply the first major network to say the number out loud. Every brokerage in the country is running some version of the same purge right now, for the same two reasons — and if you run one to ten trucks, the freight you can access next quarter depends on whether their algorithms like what they see when they look at you.

The news is the first third of this article. The rest is what to do about it: the five-check Stay-Approved Audit to run on your own authority this week, and the exact call to make if a network cuts you anyway.

The Purge Is a Fraud Story First

Landstar’s vetting buildout was born as a fraud defense, and the fraud numbers explain why. Industry estimates put freight fraud’s cost at $800 million a year and climbing; Highway’s latest index found that half of all freight fraud now starts with an email or a phone call impersonating a legitimate carrier, and CargoNet just reported $304.6 million in Q2 theft losses — more than double a year ago. A broker staring at roughly 800,000 registered entities in FMCSA’s database has no way to hand-check which thin-file carrier is a two-truck family operation and which is a chameleon running on a stolen identity. So the algorithms decide, and algorithms err toward no. The tragedy is who gets caught in the net: carriers with clean equipment and real freight histories, cut because their public record has a gap a fraud model does not like.

Montgomery v. Caribe: The Ruling Pouring Fuel on the Fire

The second accelerant arrived on May 15, when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II that federal law does not shield freight brokers from state negligent-selection lawsuits. The case grew out of a 2017 crash involving a carrier with a conditional safety rating that C.H. Robinson had hired; the Court held that claims over unsafe carrier selection fall inside the FAAAA’s safety exception and can proceed under state law. Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence offered brokers their playbook: those who exercise reasonable care in carrier selection should successfully defend such suits. Read that from a broker’s chair. “Reasonable care” now has to be provable in front of a jury — which means documented vetting, automated screens, and a paper trail showing the borderline carrier was declined. When a profile is ambiguous, the cheapest legally defensible answer is no. Landstar’s 35,000 cuts are what that math looks like at scale, and every brokerage’s counsel is pushing the same direction.

What Gets a Legitimate Carrier Cut

The flags that kill approvals are rarely the ones carriers worry about. The biggest is an empty inspection history: many vetting models treat a carrier with no roadside inspections on record as a possible shell or double-broker front, even though inspections are random and never guaranteed. Overdrive has documented legitimate, veteran owner-operators cut from multiple networks for exactly this. Second is the insurance-lapse scar: let coverage gap for even a few days and your authority shows a revocation and reinstatement — after which some systems read your twelve-year authority as three months old. Third is mismatched identity data: a phone number on your FMCSA registration that differs from your load-board profile, an address that does not match your insurance certificate, a free Gmail address where a vetting platform expects a domain. Fraudsters fake carriers with inconsistent data, so inconsistency itself has become the tell. Fourth is the record you never look at: a conditional rating, stale power-unit counts, or an old address you forgot to update, sitting in public view, screening you out silently.

The Stay-Approved Audit: Five Checks to Run This Week

Check one: pull what the algorithm sees. Go to FMCSA’s SAFER system and your SMS profile and read your own record like a broker’s vetting system would — legal name, address, phone, power units, drivers, inspection counts, BASICs, insurance on file. Ten minutes, and most carriers have never done it. Check two: fix your inspection posture. If you have zero inspections in the last twelve months, stop treating every scale bypass as a win; a clean Level 1 on your record is now a sales asset that opens networks, and an inspection-ready truck is how you bank one without fear. Check three: protect insurance continuity like your authority depends on it, because it does. Calendar your renewal 30 days out, never let a payment lapse hit the federal record, and if you switch insurers, overlap the policies by a day so the filing never gaps. Check four: one identity everywhere. Same legal name, same address, same phone, same email domain on your FMCSA registration, W-9, certificates of insurance, load-board profiles, and the major vetting platforms — claim your profile on the platforms brokers actually use and keep it current, the same discipline we teach in the Clean-Profile Audit. Check five: monitor yourself monthly. Put a recurring twenty-minute block on your calendar, screenshot your SAFER and SMS pages, and file a DataQ challenge the moment something posts wrong. In a vetting-first market, an error you have not seen is an account you are quietly losing.

If You Get Cut Anyway: The Re-Approval Play

Deactivation letters do not explain themselves, and most carriers respond with either silence or an argument. Do neither. Call the broker’s carrier-compliance line and run this script:

You will not always get an answer, but you will get one far more often than carriers who never ask — and when you do, you have a fix list instead of a mystery. Correct the item, document the correction, re-apply in writing, and follow up on the date you named. Then learn the deeper lesson: a business that can be deleted by one network’s keystroke is not a business, it is a subscription. The permanent fix is direct relationships that no algorithm can revoke — built with a carrier packet that passes vetting before it starts and a shipper list you own.

Your Public Record Is Now Your Storefront

Step back from the Landstar number and the shape of the new market is clear. Sixty-four thousand approved carriers is not a smaller pie — it is a velvet rope. The freight did not disappear; it concentrated among carriers whose records survive automated scrutiny. That is genuinely bad news for operators who treat compliance as paperwork, and genuinely good news for the small carrier willing to manage a public profile the way a restaurant manages its front window. Vetting systems cannot smell fraud — they can only read data. Make yours clean, consistent, and current, and the same algorithms that cut 35,000 of your competitors become the thing that lets a four-truck fleet win freight that used to require a sales force.

Bottom Line

Landstar cutting 35,000 carriers is not a Landstar story — it is a preview of how every broker will treat your authority from now on, with fraud losses funding the vetting technology and the Supreme Court’s Montgomery ruling supplying the legal motive. You cannot vote against the purge, but you can refuse to be collateral damage. Run the five checks this week: read your own record, bank a clean inspection, guard your insurance filing, unify your identity data, and monitor monthly. The carriers still standing inside the rope next year will be the ones who treated their public profile like the storefront it has become.

Innovative Logistics Group