On Monday, at an industry summit in Jacksonville, the CEO of one of the largest truckload companies in America said something every small carrier should read twice. Adam Miller told the WEX OTR Summit that Knight-Swift’s brokerage has slashed its pool of approved carriers by roughly 70 percent over the past two years — “We’re down 70% from maybe two years ago,” in his words — and that carriers now need at least a year under their operating authority before his brokerage will hand them a single load.

Seven out of ten carriers, gone from the list of one of the biggest freight sources in the country. And Miller was not describing a Knight-Swift quirk — he was describing where every major brokerage is headed, and he said plainly who gets squeezed: smaller and newer carriers, especially the ones living on the spot market. If that is you, this is not a story to skim. It is a deadline.

What Knight-Swift Actually Said

Per FreightWaves’ reporting from the summit, Miller gave three reasons for the purge. First, cargo theft has grown from scattered bad actors into organized crime, and a brokerage that hands loads to unfamiliar trucks — including power-only arrangements — is handing organized crime its opening. Second, broker liability has changed in the courtroom (more on that in a moment), so every carrier on the approved list is now a legal exposure the brokerage has to be able to defend. Third, the screen is deliberately aimed at what Miller called “the cheapest capacity, the less compliant carriers” — the trucks that win loads on price alone are exactly the trucks being shown the door.

Miller also noted that capacity keeps tightening while tender rejections stay elevated even though freight demand is soft — and argued that stricter enforcement and selective broker networks could keep cheap capacity from flooding back in the next upcycle. Translated for a ten-truck fleet: rates may hold up better and longer than past recoveries, but only for the carriers still inside the room when the door shuts.

The Supreme Court Ruling Behind the Purge

The legal engine under all of this is Montgomery v. Caribe Transport II, decided 9-0 by the Supreme Court on May 14. The Court held that federal law does not shield freight brokers from state negligent-selection lawsuits — meaning a broker can be sued for the carrier it chose. The case itself is instructive: the plaintiff lost a leg to a truck hauling for a carrier with a conditional safety rating and documented deficiencies in driver qualification and hours of service, and he sued the broker that arranged the load. Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence added the sentence every brokerage lawyer underlined: brokers who act reasonably and choose reputable carriers “should be able to successfully defend” such suits.

That sentence is now the blueprint. To survive a negligent-selection claim, a broker must be able to show a file proving it vetted you — which is why Miller said CSA scores, imperfect as they are, could become significant in litigation, and why he expects brokers’ insurance costs to climb steeply. Your safety record, your inspection history, and your paperwork are no longer just compliance chores. They are the evidence a broker’s lawyer either can or cannot wave at a jury — and brokers are quietly sorting every carrier in their network into one of those two piles.

Why This Lands Hardest on Small Fleets

Miller said it himself: smaller and newer carriers, especially those relying on the spot market, could find it harder to get loads. Not because a two-truck fleet is less safe than a two-thousand-truck fleet — the safety data often says otherwise — but because vetting software cannot tell a careful unknown from a dangerous one, and a lawyer building a defensible file prefers carriers with long records over carriers with short ones. The purge does not measure how well you run your trucks. It measures how easily a stranger can verify how well you run your trucks. That distinction is the whole game, and it is one a small carrier can win deliberately.

The Make-the-Cut Plan

You cannot stop the purge, and you should not want to — it is removing the chameleon carriers and double brokers who have been undercutting your rates for years. What you can do is make sure the cut lands on them and not on you. Here is the Make-the-Cut Plan: four moves, one week, in order.

Move One: Measure Your Purge Exposure

Take fifteen minutes with last quarter’s settlements and answer four questions in writing. What percentage of your revenue came through brokers versus direct customers? How many different brokerages did that revenue come from? Does any single brokerage control more than 30 percent of your revenue? And how old is your authority — because if it is under a year, Knight-Swift’s new rule means one of the largest freight sources in America will not touch you yet, whatever your rates are. A fleet that is 90 percent brokered, concentrated in two networks, on a young authority has maximum exposure: one vetting algorithm change can empty its calendar. Knowing your number is what turns the rest of this plan from advice into a schedule.

Move Two: Pass the File Review Before It Happens

The broker’s lawyer needs a defensible file on you; build it for them. Pull your own CSA snapshot this week and look at it the way a jury would — open violations, inspection history, any BASIC trending toward a threshold — and dispute what is wrong through DataQs while the reformed process is working in carriers’ favor. Confirm your insurance certificates, FMCSA record, and contact data all match perfectly; mismatches read as fraud flags to vetting software, and we walked through the full Vet-Ready Audit last week. Then get ahead of the question nobody asks until they are cut off. Call your top rep at each brokerage you depend on:

Reps answer that question, because carriers who ask it are exactly the carriers they want to keep.

Move Three: Become a Known Carrier, Not a Board Carrier

A shrinking network does not treat all survivors equally — it concentrates freight on the carriers it knows. Anonymous board carriers get cut by algorithm; known carriers get a phone call first. So pick the two or three brokerages where you already have history and deepen them deliberately: work the same reps by name, keep a clean record of every load you have run for them, and ask the question that moves you up the food chain — “We’ve run forty loads for you this year without a service failure. What does it take to get on your preferred list for this lane?” In a market where the pool just shrank 70 percent, the carriers still standing have more leverage with brokers than they have ever had. Use it on standing freight, not just today’s rate.

Move Four: Build the Door Nobody Can Close

Every structural change in this story — the liability ruling, the purge, the one-year rule — sits between you and freight that moves through a broker. None of it sits between you and a shipper. A direct customer does not purge you because a Supreme Court ruling scared its lawyers; it keeps you because its dock knows your driver’s name. If the exposure audit in Move One scared you, that is the week to finally build the 50-name prospect list and start converting your steadiest brokered freight into a dedicated lane you control. The carriers who come out of this era strongest will be the ones who treated the spot market as a supplement — because that is exactly what the big brokerages just decided it should be.

Bottom Line

The spot market is turning into a members-only room. Knight-Swift’s 70 percent cut is just the loudest version of what Montgomery v. Caribe made inevitable: every brokerage in America is building a shorter, safer, more defensible carrier list, and freight — in a market where truck posts are already down a quarter from last year — will concentrate on the carriers who make those lists. Measure your exposure, clean your file, deepen the relationships you have, and build the direct freight nobody can take away. The purge is coming either way. Be the reason it works in your favor.

Innovative Logistics Group