The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration expects to repair the user-facing defects of its Motus registration system within "weeks," deputy administrator Jesse Elison told industry officials, while warning that backend fixes will stretch considerably longer.

Speaking at the National Motor Freight Traffic Association cybersecurity conference in Long Beach, California, Elison said "behind the scenes, there's a lot of attention to timelines and schedules" for the front-end rebuild of the federal carrier registration portal launched May 14.

The rollout has drawn sustained complaints from motor carriers, third-party logistics providers and registration services since launch day. Elison acknowledged the agency entered the rollout with "a high level of confidence" that the process would work.

"Those following weeks were really really tough, because what we had built wasn't working, and every time we tried to fix it, it worked less," Elison said.

What did FMCSA change in September?

The agency on September 10 temporarily suspended enforcement of biennial registration updates and the concurrent deactivation of Department of Transportation numbers for carriers whose biennial requirement fell after June 1. The pause gave carriers breathing room while Motus stabilized and prevented thousands of small fleets from losing operating authority through a faulty portal.

FMCSA, under administrator Derek Barrs, pushed harder to bring Motus online than its predecessors had — even though the underlying statutory obligation stretched back roughly a decade. "It's a huge challenge, but we were not going to punt that responsibility," Elison said. "The industry deserved that FMCSA followthrough, and so we went after it."

Where does Motus stand now?

In the "last couple of months," Elison said, FMCSA "made really great strides to stabilize it a little bit." He conceded, however, "it is not where it needs to be."

The near-term target is a seamless experience for carriers and registration agents filing biennial updates, new MC authority requests and changes to existing operating authority. The longer-term target, by Elison's own account, will run much further out: "ongoing for some time."

What's the commercial fallout?

The breakdown reaches beyond the FMCSA portal itself. Brokers, factoring firms, insurance underwriters and surety providers all rely on FMCSA registration data to vet carriers before tendering freight. Erroneous or stale records from a malfunctioning system delay carrier onboarding, slow factoring approvals and raise compliance costs for small fleets that lack regulatory staff.

Third-party registration services — a niche but well-trafficked segment serving owner-operators — absorbed the bulk of complaint volume during the launch and have pressed FMCSA to publish a stable release schedule.

Can Motus help fight freight fraud?

Elison framed the system's payoff in terms of fraud control. Carrier registration data, he said, is "a point of entry that we have to get right in order to combat the bad actors." A functioning front-end, paired with reliable backend screening, would let FMCSA flag shell operators earlier in the vetting chain — a structural gap that fraud specialists have linked to phantom-carrier schemes that book loads and disappear before payment.

Elison's characterization of progress was characteristically measured. "We're much better off today than we were yesterday," he said. "We're going to get there."

What should carriers expect?

Carriers and registration service firms should plan for a two-track timeline:

• A near-term user-interface fix within weeks, per Elison's forecast
• A longer-running backend stabilization that the deputy administrator said "will be ongoing for some time"
• The September 10 enforcement pause, which remains in effect for carriers with biennial requirements due after June 1

Until FMCSA formally lifts the suspension, those carriers keep their DOT numbers regardless of filing status — a stopgap that buys the agency runway to rebuild a system it now concedes it shipped before the software was ready, and that will likely set the tone for the next biennial update cycle in 2027.