On August 13, 2026, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, California Attorney General Rob Bonta, District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb, and Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones co-led a coalition 21 attorneys general and the governor of Pennsylvania in filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration to block the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) from obtaining sensitive personal information belonging to approximately 17 million commercial drivers nationwide.  

The information, maintained through the state-owned Commercial Driver’s License Information System (CDLIS), includes drivers’ dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and driver’s license numbers. The coalition argues that the federal government has no legal authority to seize the states’ confidential records and is attempting to transform a secure state-to-state licensing system into a federal database that Congress never authorized. 

The lawsuit challenges a July 23, 2026, demand by Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) that the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA), which operates CDLIS on behalf of the states, turn over the entire database, including five years of records. When AAMVA raised legal concerns, FMCSA threatened to terminate all of its federal grants and contracts unless it complied. The states argue that this puts them in an untenable position: either allow the federal government to obtain millions of drivers’ confidential records or risk losing the funding necessary to operate CDLIS, which states rely on to issue commercial driver’s licenses and ensure that commercial drivers are properly licensed and qualified. 

The lawsuit alleges that the administration’s demand violates the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, the Privacy Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, and the Spending Clause. The coalition is asking the courts to declare the federal demands unlawful, block DOT from obtaining the states’ records, and prevent AAMVA from turning over the information while the litigation proceeds. 

Yet again, the Trump administration has threatened to hold federal funding hostage in order to obtain personally identifiable information of millions of Americans for improper purposes. This database was created 40 years ago so states could share information with each other to stop unsafe drivers from operating commercial vehicles, and the federal government’s decision to ransack that database puts the whole system in jeopardy. I will continue to push back on the unnecessary and unlawful attempts of the Trump administration to misuse Americans’ most personal information.Attorney General Kwame Raoul