FMCSA's Deputy Administrator Says the Motus Fix Is 'Weeks' Away, the Rule to End ELD Self-Certification Is Still Being Written, and New Research Says Three of Every Four Registered ELDs Are the Same Device Under a Different Name

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's deputy administrator stood in front of a room full of trucking cybersecurity people in Long Beach, California, on Thursday and said what carriers have been saying since May: Motus did not work. 'Those following weeks were really really tough, because what we had built wasn't working, and every time we tried to fix it, it worked less,' Jesse Elison told the National Motor Freight Traffic Association's cybersecurity conference, according to FreightWaves. The front-end fix, he said, will 'hopefully' be measured in weeks. The back end 'will be ongoing for some time.' And the rule that would end self-certification of electronic logging devices is still being written, ten months after FMCSA announced a 'complete overhaul' of ELD vetting. It was a candid speech. It was also delivered two days after researchers at the same conference, on its opening day, presented a number that explains why the ELD rule matters more than the Motus one: about three of every four devices on FMCSA's ELD registry appear to be the same product wearing a different name.

Motus: 'much better off today than we were yesterday'

Motus is the registration system FMCSA launched on May 14 to replace several legacy registration systems and to close a door that freight fraudsters had been walking through for years. Elison said the agency went into launch with 'a high level of confidence' and that building it was 'a decade-long statutory obligation of FMCSA' that administrator Derek Barrs chose not to punt: 'It's a huge challenge, but we were not going to punt that responsibility. The industry deserved that FMCSA followthrough, and so we went after it.' Over the 'last couple of months,' he said, the agency has 'made really great strides to stabilize it a little bit.' Behind the scenes, 'there's a lot of attention to timelines and schedules.'

The most visible concession so far came on September 10, when FMCSA temporarily suspended enforcement of the biennial update requirement, and the automatic deactivation of USDOT numbers that goes with it, for carriers whose update came due after June 1. That pause is still in effect. Elison's forecast is that the user experience, the part carriers touch, 'needs to be seamless for somebody to come into the system,' and that the industry will notice additional fixes in a matter of weeks. He did not give a date. He did say why the agency is not backing off: Motus is 'a point of entry that we have to get right in order to combat the bad actors, and we're going to do that.'

The ELD rule that is still not written

In his keynote, Elison also confirmed that FMCSA is still working on a rule to end the self-certification process for ELDs, one of administrator Barrs' top priorities, Truck News reported. 'The self-certification process, I've never heard anybody argue that it has worked,' he said. In the meantime the agency has been working the problem device by device: it has removed nearly 100 ELDs from the registry since the start of 2025 and allowed 'one or two new providers to be certified.' That process has been the registry's original sin since the 2017 mandate: a vendor fills out a form, declares the device compliant, and it goes on the list that every roadside inspector and every carrier relies on. On December 1, 2025, FMCSA announced what it called 'a complete overhaul' of the vetting process, with an initial review of technical documentation, fraud detection, and a categorization of applications as approved, information requested, further review or denied. 'By strengthening our review process for ELDs, we are ensuring the industry can rely on trusted equipment,' Barrs said at the time. Ten months later the overhaul is a priority, not a regulation.

The research NMFTA presented on the conference's first day shows what the delay costs. Analyzing the roughly 1,050 ELDs registered with FMCSA, the association's researchers determined that about three-quarters appear to share underlying hardware and software: one developer builds the device and the app, and resellers register it under their own brand. NMFTA grouped the devices into families of white-labeled products; at least one family contains more than 100 products sold under different names. Elison did not directly address that finding in his remarks.

What this means if you are choosing or running an ELD

The Motus phishing emails have not stopped

Elison's point about Motus being a point of entry for bad actors cuts both ways. Since mid-September FMCSA has had a fraud alert out about emails with the subject line 'Notice of Required Off-Cycle Update – Motus email' that push carriers to a 'New MOTUS Portal' link. The links go to look-alike domains, among them dot.motusdatasboard.com, dot.motusdatadesk.com, dot.motuswebdeck.com and dot.motusfunction.com. The only legitimate address is motus.dot.gov. The tell is that the scam spells the name in capitals; the agency does not. If you entered credentials on one of those pages, FMCSA's contact center is at 800-832-5660, and the complaint goes to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. With biennial-update enforcement paused, an unsolicited email demanding an 'off-cycle update' is a red flag, not a deadline.

Elison's summary was 'we're much better off today than we were yesterday,' with the concession that Motus is 'not where it needs to be.' For Motus that is probably a fair reading. For the ELD registry, the day that matters is the one when the self-certification rule is published, and nobody at FMCSA has named it yet.