C.H. Robinson Is Removing Carriers Based on Safety Scores. A Supreme Court Decision Two Weeks Ago May Explain Why.
A notice has been going out to carriers in the C.H. Robinson network, and it is worth reading carefully because of what may sit behind it.
The message, branded under C.H. Robinson and titled “Changes to carrier eligibility,” tells the recipient that their company “exceeds intervention thresholds for C.H. Robinson’s scoring model based on data from the FMCSA.” Effective immediately, the notice states, the account is moved to non-certified status until BASIC scores improve. The carrier loses access to book loads on Navisphere Carrier and through their aligned representative immediately. Loads in transit deliver and get paid as normal. Existing payables process in full. But the ability to book new freight is gone until the safety scores come back into the broker’s acceptable range.
On its face, this reads as a safety policy update. Read against what happened at the Supreme Court two weeks before these notices started circulating, it invites a different question: is the freight brokerage industry beginning to reprice carrier risk in real time, because the legal consequences of getting that risk assessment wrong just changed permanently?
C.H. Robinson has not publicly stated that the eligibility change is connected to the Supreme Court ruling, and the company has not publicly announce additional changes. What follows is an analysis of the ruling, the notice, and the timing; and readers should weigh the connection as a strong inference supported by sequence and mechanism, not as a stated company position.
CHR is referring me to the FMCSA in order to raise my safety score before they can work with me and a lot of other carriers again.
I have 0% OOS/Violations – makes no sense. 🤷🏻♂️ https://t.co/QCFjMcq21o
— thewastedyears (@Thewastedyea) May 29, 2026
What the Supreme Court Actually Did on May 14
To understand why the C.H. Robinson notice is drawing attention, you have to understand Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, LLC and the decision is more consequential for smaller carriers than almost anything else that has happened in freight this year.
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. Justice Kavanaugh concurred, joined by Justice Alito. There was no dissent.
The case started with a 2017 crash on Interstate 70 in Illinois. Shawn Montgomery had pulled his vehicle onto the shoulder when a tractor-trailer operated by Caribe Transport II veered off the road and struck him. Montgomery lost his leg. He sued the driver, the carrier, and the freight broker that arranged the load — C.H. Robinson. His claim against the broker was specific: C.H. Robinson negligently selected Caribe Transport when it knew or should have known the carrier posed a safety risk. Montgomery pointed to Caribe’s conditional FMCSA safety rating, with documented deficiencies in driver qualification, hours of service, vehicle maintenance, and crash rate.
For years, brokers defeated claims like this with one argument: federal preemption. The FAAAA bars state laws “related to a price, route, or service” of a broker, and brokers argued that negligent selection claims fell under that bar. The district court agreed., the Seventh Circuit agreed then the Supreme Court took the case and reversed everyone.
Barrett’s reasoning was direct. The FAAAA contains a safety exception that preserves “the safety regulatory authority of a State with respect to motor vehicles.” Requiring C.H. Robinson to exercise ordinary care in selecting a carrier, Barrett wrote, “concerns motor vehicles; most obviously, the trucks that will transport the goods.” That puts the negligent hiring claim inside the safety exception, which saves it from preemption. The shield brokers had relied on for years was gone in a unanimous decision that legal analysts described as fitting its core reasoning “on a napkin.”
The practical effect: a broker can now be sued in state court for negligently selecting an unsafe carrier, and the case can proceed on the merits rather than being dismissed early on preemption grounds. In an environment where nuclear verdicts against trucking-related defendants regularly exceed $10 million, that exposure is significant even for a company the size of C.H. Robinson.
From Reddit: an email screenshot from CHR to a carrier. I appears 3PLs are actively culling their own carrier base that doesn’t meet revised safety thresholds. A safety induced capacity crunch. pic.twitter.com/o044E1lczd
— Thomas Wasson (@ThomasWasson) May 29, 2026
Why the Ruling and the Notice Appear Connected
The C.H. Robinson carrier eligibility notice does not mention Montgomery v. Caribe. The connection, if there is one, is in the mechanism — and the mechanism is worth laying out plainly so readers can judge it for themselves.
The Supreme Court decision means a broker’s carrier selection process is now a potential source of direct legal liability. If a broker tenders a load to a carrier with poor safety scores, and that carrier is later involved in a catastrophic crash, the broker can now face a negligence claim in state court for having selected that carrier. The most important piece of evidence in that kind of case would be the carrier’s FMCSA safety data which is the same BASIC scores that C.H. Robinson’s notice references as the basis for moving carriers to non-certified status.
The sequence is what draws attention: two weeks after the Supreme Court held that brokers can be sued for selecting carriers with poor safety scores, the largest freight broker in North America began removing carriers with elevated safety scores from its board. That timing, combined with the fact that the notice’s stated criterion is FMCSA BASIC data, is why carriers and industry observers are connecting the two. It is a reasonable inference. It is not, at this point, a confirmed company rationale and this article does not present it as one.
The carrier exchanges circulating on social media this week shows how the change is landing on the ground. One carrier posted openly on X— an account whose claims have not been independently verified — that C.H. Robinson disabled access to their load board, initially unsure whether it was specific to them or “something related to the lawsuit.” In follow-up posts, the carrier said they were told by their C.H. Robinson representative that the company is referring carriers to FMCSA for safety score assessments and that many carriers are going through the same thing. The carrier’s stated frustration: that they have a clean out-of-service and violation record and still exceeded the broker’s threshold.
That detail, if accurate, points to the crux of the problem for small carriers caught in this. A carrier can have a clean out-of-service rate and pass inspections and still exceed a broker’s internal scoring threshold because the scoring model draws on the full range of FMCSA BASIC data, not out-of-service violations alone, and the threshold for what a broker will now accept appears to be tightening. The effect is less freight options for the carrier.
Why a Broker’s Threshold Would Move
Before Montgomery, a broker’s calculus on carrier safety scores balanced two things: the operational need for capacity against the relatively contained legal risk of using a carrier with mediocre scores, since preemption usually got negligent selection claims dismissed early.
After Montgomery, that balance shifts. The legal risk of using a carrier with elevated BASIC scores is no longer contained by preemption. It is a live exposure that can reach a jury. A risk-averse broker has a rational incentive to tighten its carrier acceptance threshold, reducing the population of carriers whose safety data could later be used to argue negligent selection. And after a 9-0 Supreme Court loss, the entire industry has reason to be risk-averse on this specific question.
That is the logic that connects the ruling to the kind of policy change the C.H. Robinson notice describes. Whether or not C.H. Robinson cites Montgomery as its reason, the incentive the ruling created points directly toward exactly this type of response and it points there for potentially every broker, not just one.
What This Means for Small Carriers Right Now
Regardless of C.H. Robinson’s stated rationale, the Montgomery decision changes how small carriers need to manage their FMCSA safety profile. This is no longer only about passing inspections and avoiding out-of-service orders. It is increasingly about where your BASIC scores sit relative to broker acceptance thresholds that have a clear new incentive to tighten across the industry.
Your CSA BASIC scores are now a commercial asset or a commercial liability in a way they were not three weeks ago. The seven BASIC categories: unsafe driving, hours-of-service compliance, driver fitness, controlled substances, vehicle maintenance, hazardous materials, and crash indicator all feed the scoring models brokers use to assess legal risk. A carrier who has not been actively managing those scores may have been treating them as a DOT enforcement matter only. After Montgomery, they carry commercial weight too.
The specific actions that matter now. Pull your current BASIC scores through the FMCSA portal and know exactly where you stand in each category. A score that sits below the intervention threshold for DOT purposes may still land above a broker’s commercial threshold. If you are a motor carrier and you have violations you believe were cited incorrectly, file DataQ challenges. Successfully challenged violations are removed from your record, and every violation you can legitimately remove improves your standing. If your scores are elevated, the path back is what it has always been: clean inspections accumulating over the 24-month rolling window CSA uses. What has changed is the commercial stakes attached to that cleanup.
The gap a carrier feels when a clean out-of-service record still results in lost board access is the gap between DOT compliance and commercial acceptability. For practical purposes those used to be close to the same thing. They may not be anymore.
The Bigger Picture: Capacity, Rates, and Where the Freight Goes
There is a second-order effect worth thinking through. If C.H. Robinson and other major brokers tighten carrier eligibility based on safety scores, they reduce their own available capacity at a time when the freight market has already been tightening on the supply side. A broker covering the same freight with fewer eligible carriers generally pays more to do it. The carriers who remain eligible (those with BASIC scores comfortably below the new thresholds) gain leverage. The carriers who lose eligibility lose access to a major freight source and have to rebuild it elsewhere.
This has the shape of a sorting event. It separates carriers into those whose safety profile clears the new commercial bar and those whose does not. For carriers on the right side of that line, reduced competition for broker freight is an opportunity. For carriers on the wrong side, it is a serious problem that calls for immediate attention to safety score management and likely a pivot toward direct shipper relationships and brokers with different risk tolerances while the BASIC scores are rehabilitated.
The Montgomery decision changed broker legal exposure unanimously, permanently, and effective immediately. The clearest takeaway for carriers is this: the value of a clean safety record just moved from a compliance matter toward a commercial advantage, and that shift is worth acting on now regardless of how any single broker explains its policies.
