Authority Trends Analysis

Analysis

· as of August 1, 2026

The most anomalous feature of this dataset is not the multi-year decline in authority grants, but the complete disappearance of revocations starting in March 2026. From March through July 2026, total revocations recorded are 1, 0, 0, 0, and 0 respectively, compared to a monthly average of roughly 6,500 revocations throughout 2023 and 2024. This almost certainly reflects a data latency or ingestion issue rather than any real-world regulatory change, and any net figures or trend comparisons involving those months should be treated as provisional. February 2026 shows a partial recovery in revocations at 832, still a fraction of the prior-year monthly norm, suggesting the pipeline disruption began sometime in late January 2026.

Setting aside those incomplete months, the underlying structural trend is clear. Total monthly grants peaked around mid-2021, when August 2021 recorded 9,824 grants against 2,544 revocations for a net of +7,280. By January 2024, grants had fallen to 4,246 while revocations reached 7,967, producing a net of -3,721, the worst single month in the dataset. Grants have not returned to positive net territory on a sustained basis since mid-2022. Over the trailing 12 months of complete data, total grants reached 53,326 against revocations of 40,861, but this comparison is distorted upward on the net side by the zero-revocation months.

The divergence across authority types is consistent and persistent. Common authority dominates the volume on both sides of the ledger, accounting for roughly 88% of trailing-12-month grants at 48,396. Contract authority, by contrast, has recorded negative net balances every month in the series without exception, and its grant volumes have compressed sharply, falling from around 280 to 300 per month in mid-2021 to 64 in January 2025 and 67 in January 2026. Broker authority followed a similar arc but with somewhat less severity on the grant side.

The sustained negative net balance from late 2022 onward is consistent with the broader freight market contraction that followed the pandemic-era capacity expansion, as carriers that entered the market during the 2021 boom faced deteriorating spot rates and higher operating costs. Over the full 60-month window, cumulative net new authority totals approximately 32,114, a figure that obscures the sharp reversal from the growth phase of 2021 to the contraction phase that has dominated since.