Kamala Harris’ trucking record: ‘Dirty diesel’ regs, tax policy

Kamala Harris, the sitting Vice President hoping her nation will find her worthy of a promotion on November 5, isn’t exactly preferred by the trucking industry professionals polled by Overdrive.

Just 19% of poll respondents planned to vote for Harris, while 3 in 4 signaled support for former President Donald Trump. A look at Harris’ record on trucking-related policy shows that in her one Senate term and time as Vice President, she hasn’t done a lot to directly impact trucking, at least not enough to reverse the trend of trucking’s donor class favoring Republicans in every presidential election at least as far back as 1992, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets.

But with seven-plus years holding national office, first as Senator representing California, the Vice President has put her vote on various pieces of impactful legislation and helped execute Biden-Harris policy through the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and other agencies that impact trucking.

Kamala Harris’ legislative record

Harris voted for the consequential Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (the CARES Act), the $2.2 trillion economic stimulus bill responsible for stimulus payment checks, PPP loans, Economic Injury Disaster Loans, and other provisions just two weeks after the official declaration of a pandemic in March 2020. She shares that piece of history with former President Trump, who signed the bill into law.

This act opened up forgivable and low-rate business loans for businesses of all types, and also likely fueled the historic shopping spree Americans went on in 2020-’22, which sent freight rates to towering heights starting in 2020 under the Trump administration, reaching their apex in 2021 and the beginning of 2022 under Biden-Harris.

By the time the CARES Act passed, Harris had already dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 election, yet would soon find herself in the White House, just not behind the resolute desk. Another irony: Harris’ most impactful work in the Senate came during her time as Vice President, when she cast a record-setting number of tie-breaking votes.

As VP, she cast the tie-breaking vote on the American Rescue Plan, another $1.9 trillion stimulus package in 2021. That legislation delivered significant savings on health insurance rates for self-employed individuals utilizing the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges — impacting up to 20 percent of owner-operators at the time. Harris was also the deciding vote on in the Senate on the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which extended the ACA provisions of the American Rescue Plan but did a lot more besides. It aimed to further push cleaner energy and electric vehicle transition with investment, in hopes of creating jobs at home and bringing down costs.

In 2021, the Biden White House also signed into law the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which “makes historic investments in the transportation sector: improving public safety and climate resilience, creating jobs across the country, and delivering a more equitable future,” according to the DOT. The legislation also tasked the FMCSA with convening its Truck Leasing Task Force to examine inequitable and/or predatory lease-purchase arrangements, likewise the Women of Trucking Advisory Board. Also on the regulatory front, it required an Automatic Emergency Braking mandate, which both FMCSA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration continue to pursue, and more.

During her time as California’s Attorney General in 2010, Harris defended California Air Resources Board rules aimed at swiftly reducing diesel and other emissions — sometimes at great expense to small-business truckers. In that role, Harris defeated various lawsuits against CARB’s Truck and Bus Rule, which phased out in-use 2006 and older trucks altogether in the state when some of those rigs were but eight years old in 2014.

Biden-Harris environmental policy today puts climate and equity goals at the forefront. But Harris’s perhaps most significant contribution to trucking law doesn’t even mention equity or diversity.

In March of 2022, leveraging provisions in the American Rescue Plan and infrastructure legislation, Harris announced “Actions to Accelerate Clean Transit Buses, School Buses, and Trucks,” which the White House described as “major federal actions that will expand clean public transit and school buses, reduce emissions from dirty diesel trucks, and create good-paying jobs.”

One of those announced actions was EPA’s Phase 3 greenhouse gas regulation governing heavy-duty truck manufacturers, which became final in March. The Phase 3 rule requires steep cuts in emissions such that, by 2032, 25% of new heavy trucks sold in the U.S. could need be zero emission vehicles (ZEVs) to meet those cuts. There have been plenty legal challenges to that rule, but it remains in place as cases work their way through the courts.

Harris’ 2024 rival, Trump, has promised to stop what he calls “EV mandates” in their tracks.

Regulatory impact

Under the Biden-Harris administration, FMCSA has proven responsive in some ways to trucking stakeholder concerns, going forward with a massive modernization of its registration system meant to stamp out fraud, taking a more engaged approach to a safety rating revamp than the previous Democratic administration, and remaining receptive to owner-operators’ concerns around transparency in brokered-freight transactions. (Government engagement on transparency began under the Trump administration.) But the agency has also pursued certainly less popular initiatives, like a speed limiter mandate, without express Congressional requirement. A full accounting of FMCSA’s 2024 regulatory agenda can be found here.

Elsewhere among federal agencies under the Biden-Harris White House, the Department of Labor moved forward with a replacement for the Trump DOL’s independent contractor status rule, and NHTSA has moved forward with a side-underride guard mandate — after being required in the 2021 infrastructure legislation to examine the guards’ efficacy. And, of course, the EPA continues its efforts to try and phase fossil fuels out of the economy, amid numerous lawsuits and outcry from trucking stakeholders.

It’s true that presidents and vice presidents alike don’t often get too hands-on with the individual trucking regulations their agencies promulgate. But to the extent leadership over the agencies and/or general policy direction might remain the same or similar under a President Harris as currently strucutred, it’s reasonable to expect agencies to continue in the same direction.

Tax policy

While Harris hasn’t specifically addressed the trucking industry with much of her policy, she has campaigned on a tax plan that she hopes will appeal to small business owners. As part of a plan to help Americans launch 25 million new small businesses, Harris promised a tenfold increase to the Section 195 deduction limit for startup expenses from $5,000 to $50,000.

She has also announced plans to expand the child tax credit to $6,000 for children under age 1, $3,600 for children 2-5, and $3,000 for older children and also expand the earned income tax credit for filers who do not claim children

Trump’s signature tax plan, passed in 2017 and set to expire in 2025, included a 20% deduction for qualified business income, and it’s unclear just yet if Harris would let that expire. She does, however, hope to raise income taxes on those earning about $400,000 and raise the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21%.

Much of Harris’ tax policy will likely follow Biden’s 2025 budget plan, though she has differed from him in saying she’d like to see long-term capital gains and qualified dividends at 28 percent, compared to 39.6 percent in the Biden 2025 budget.

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