Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Monday his department is shutting down 110-plus driving schools that gave licenses to drivers who failed English language proficiency (ELP) tests. In a release, the Department of Transportation…
Page B1From§Eachthe early bird edition — 31 August 2026
Duffy shuts down 110 driving schools over English rules; his agency insists 'D.E.I. bike paths' are real.
Born sometime in the last century, out of the plain need for a person to learn to stop a car before a state let them drive one: the commercial driving school. Died this week, 110 of them at once, by emergency order of the Department of Transportation, over an English proficiency rule. No trial period. No transition plan mentioned in the announcement. Just the paperwork, and then the doors. Survived by every student mid-course, whose lessons are now void, and by every small operator who built a business on teaching people a skill the state requires and then, without much warning, decided the requirement had a language attached to it. Preceded in death, in the same department, in the same week, by absolutely nothing — because the companion story here isn't a death, it's a resurrection of a phrase nobody asked for. The same federal transportation apparatus that closed those schools also went on the record insisting, to a newspaper that asked a fairly plain question, that yes, diversity-oriented bike paths are a real category of federal concern. So the driving schools, actual infrastructure, actual paperwork, actual people who needed a license to keep a job, got a shutdown notice. The bike paths, a phrase invented mostly by people who dislike the phrase, got a defense. That is not a coincidence, whippersnapper, that's a budget. One is the kind of program that gets protected because someone somewhere needs to be able to say it was defended. The other is the kind that gets closed because the people it serves don't have anyone in the room saying their name. It's penny-ante stuff, in the grand scheme, 110 storefronts, some hand-lettered signs, some instructors out of a paycheck — and it's also, honestly, kind of a shit way to run a safety agency, closing schools by decree while defending a metaphor in print. In lieu of flowers, the department might consider publishing the actual proficiency standard it used, in writing, before it closes school number 111.
“One office closes 110 schools by lunchtime over a language rule and the same office spends its afternoon arguing, on the record, that a bike path can be an ideology. Pick a lane, Secretary, the rest of us are trying to get to work.”
“The shutdowns were an emergency safety action, full stop, nothing to do with the language spoken at home — did I say language at home? I meant proficiency, which is, look, it's a safety standard, we've said that from the start, more or less.”
The receipts
The administration has revoked funding for bike paths, and encouraged removing some. A cycling advocate said it is playing on the idea of “that dork on a bike.”
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.