If you run a small trucking operation — five trucks, maybe ten, maybe just yourself — and you woke up recently to find you can no longer book loads through C.H. Robinson, you are not alone, and you are not being singled out arbitrarily. What is happening to you is the downstream consequence of a legal earthquake that struck the industry on May 14, 2026, and its effects will spread well beyond C.H. Robinson.
Here is what happened, why it matters specifically to small carriers, and what you can do right now.
The Notice
A notice has been going out to carriers in the C.H. Robinson network titled “Changes to carrier eligibility,” telling recipients that their company “exceeds intervention thresholds for C.H. Robinson’s scoring model based on data from the FMCSA.” Effective immediately, the account is moved to non-certified status until BASIC scores improve. The carrier immediately loses access to book loads on Navisphere Carrier and through their aligned representative. Loads in transit are delivered and get paid as normal. The existing payables process is in full. But the ability to book new freight is gone until the safety scores return to the broker’s acceptable range.
Some carriers receiving this notice have clean records. At least one carrier on social media reported being referred to the FMCSA to raise their safety score before C.H. Robinson will work with them again, despite having zero out-of-service violations. The algorithm caught them anyway. That tells you this is not a targeted disciplinary action. It is a policy-level reset driven by something bigger.
The Supreme Court Decision That Triggered This
On May 14, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously, 9-0, that state-law negligent hiring claims against freight brokers are not preempted by the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the opinion. There was no dissent.
The case — Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II — began when petitioner Shawn Montgomery sustained severe and permanent injuries after his tractor-trailer was struck by a truck driven by a carrier’s employee. The transportation broker, C.H. Robinson Worldwide, had coordinated the shipment. Montgomery sued, alleging C.H. Robinson was liable because it negligently hired the carrier, claiming C.H. Robinson knew, or should have known from the carrier’s safety rating, that hiring it to transport goods was reasonably likely to result in crashes that would injure others.
C.H. Robinson argued the claim was preempted by the FAAAA. Federal courts had been split on the question for years, with the Sixth and Ninth Circuits allowing such claims to proceed, and the Seventh and Eleventh Circuits dismissing them. The Supreme Court took the case to resolve that split — and reversed everyone who had sided with the broker.
What that means in plain language: brokers can now be sued in state courts across the country for choosing the wrong carrier. The legal shield they relied on for years is gone.
Why This Hits Small Carriers Hardest
Large fleets have dedicated safety departments, compliance officers, and the resources to fight an unfair BASIC score through the DataQs process. When a score pops up wrong, they have someone whose job it is to fix it.
You probably don’t.
C.H. Robinson has stated it will continue to select only carriers licensed by the FMCSA as required by law, support strong federal oversight, and serve customers without disruption. That sounds reasonable until you realize what it means operationally: every broker in the country is now looking at their carrier network through the lens of legal liability. The question the industry is quietly asking is whether freight brokers are beginning to reprice carrier risk in real time, because the legal consequences of getting that risk assessment wrong just changed permanently.
For a small carrier, the math is brutal. A broker with 50,000 carriers in its network who faces potential negligent-hiring lawsuits now has a powerful incentive to cut anyone with a yellow or red flag in the FMCSA system — even if that flag is a statistical artifact, a data error, or reflects a single incident years ago that doesn’t represent how you operate today. You are not worth the legal risk when other carriers with cleaner scores are available.
C.H. Robinson has stated it is disappointed in the Court’s decision but will operate responsibly and work constructively with regulators, carriers, and customers. That is a corporate statement. What small carriers are experiencing on the ground is something more immediate: the access to freight they depended on yesterday is gone today.
What You Should Do Right Now
1. Pull your SMS/BASIC data immediately. Go to the FMCSA’s Safety Measurement System and look at every BASIC category you are flagged in. Understand specifically which scores pushed you over C.H. Robinson’s threshold. You cannot fight what you cannot see.
2. File DataQs challenges on anything wrong. FMCSA data has errors. Inspections get miscoded. Crashes get attributed to the wrong party. If anything in your record is factually inaccurate, challenge it formally. This is your legitimate path to improving a score that does not reflect your actual operation.
3. Diversify your broker relationships right now. C.H. Robinson will not be the last broker to tighten standards in the wake of this ruling. If CHR represented a large percentage of your freight, that concentration was already a vulnerability — this just exposed it. Build relationships with smaller regional brokers, direct shippers, and freight networks that are less exposed to the same legal pressure.
4. Understand that this is not personal — but it is permanent. C.H. Robinson has not publicly stated that the eligibility change is connected to the Supreme Court ruling. But the timing and the mechanism point in one direction. The liability calculus for every broker in America changed on May 14. Expect other large brokers to follow with their own versions of tightened carrier eligibility standards in the months ahead.
5. Talk to your insurance broker. The ruling has implications for how carriers are underwritten, not just how brokers select them. Your coverage and your premiums may look different at renewal.
The Bigger Picture
The Supreme Court’s ruling was framed as a victory for injured parties — and for Shawn Montgomery, who lost his leg, it is. But the freight market does not respond to legal outcomes with nuance. It responds with risk repricing.
What is being repriced right now is you. Every broker that touches your authority will be asking a version of the same question: if this carrier is in an accident, can we be sued for choosing them? The answer, in any state in the country, is now yes.
That does not mean small carriers cannot operate. It means the era of accessing top-tier broker freight with marginal safety scores is over. Your BASIC scores are now, functionally, your credit rating in this industry — and the brokers have started checking.
The carriers who move quickly to understand their scores, dispute what is wrong, and build relationships beyond the large broker platforms will be in the best position. The ones who wait will find that more doors close before the scores ever have a chance to recover.
