49 U.S.C. § 31309 — Commercial driver’s license information system

(a) General Requirement — The Secretary of Transportation must maintain a national information system that acts as a central repository of information about commercial motor vehicle operators — their licensing, their identity, and any disqualifications. This system must be coordinated with the activities under section 31106, and the Secretary must consult the states while running it. (b) Contents — At minimum, the system must hold, for each operator: whatever information the Secretary thinks is needed to identify them; their name, address, and physical description; their Social Security number or another ID number the Secretary considers appropriate; which state issued their license or permit; the dates it's valid; and whether they've had a commercial license or permit revoked, suspended, or canceled, lost the right to drive in a state, or been disqualified. The system must also be able to handle the unique fraud-resistant identifiers required under section 31308(3). (c) Availability of Information — Information in the system must be made available, and subject to review and correction, following the policy set under section 31106(e). (d) Authorized Operator — The Secretary may let a qualified outside entity operate, maintain, develop, modernize, and improve the system, collect fees for it on the Secretary's behalf, and use those fees, as described below. (e) Fee System — The Secretary or the authorized operator may charge a reasonable fee for using the system, set so total fees roughly match what's needed to run, maintain, and improve the system, including staff and administrative costs. Those fees go into either a government appropriation account or an account the authorized operator sets up, and stay available until spent for those purposes. If there's an authorized operator, the Secretary itself is never charged a fee for accessing the system, and gets to see fee statements every quarter. (f) Modernization Plan — Within 120 days of this subsection becoming law, the Secretary had to publish a national plan to modernize the system — one that meets federal IT security standards, allows all information (including convictions) to be exchanged electronically, checks itself to make sure states are posting data correctly and consistently, links the commercial driver's license to the medical certificate, and lays out a modernization schedule. The Secretary had to develop this plan together with the motor carrier industry, state safety agencies, and state licensing agencies, and the plan must say that states will fund future modernization work. It must also set a date by which every state must run a compatible system and use it to send and receive conviction and disqualification data — a date the Secretary sets after considering the cost and availability of the needed technology and how long it takes to install and test it. The Secretary must then carry out the plan and modernize the system to match it. (g) Funding — At the Secretary's discretion, and subject to certain conditions in section 31313, a state may use funds it gets under that section to modernize its own commercial driver's license information system so it works with the modernized national system.