FMCSA Testing When Off Duty

Truck driver Nathan Weidert has submitted a petition for rulemaking to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to prevent off-duty driver notifications of random drug screens.

Current regulations do not "prohibit an employer from notifying a driver of his/her selection for a random controlled substances test while the driver is in an off-duty status," according to this Q&A about FMCSA guidance.  

Weidert's petition for the change follows his own experience of a former employer facing a quarterly deadline for random testing of their CDL drivers. Weidert had been driving seasonally for the company and was at the very end of his contract term. "There was no more work scheduled for them," he wrote in the petition. 

He told Overdrive the company nonetheless selected him for random testing and that, when he objected that he was no longer under the company's employment, reported the refusal to test to the Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse, necessitating burdensome return-to-duty procedures on his part to be authorized to operate a truck again. 

"They used me as a scapegoat ... to meet their own deadline and protect themselves, thereby causing me great unnecessary stress and a lot of frustration," he wrote in the petition. "Forcing a driver to proceed immediately to a collection site when they are off-duty ignores common sense and impacts a driver’s rest periods, along with their hours-of-service (HOS) clock."