(DCNF)—Americans may be paying a hidden “lawsuit tax” through higher insurance premiums and higher prices for everyday goods, as trucking companies face rising litigation costs from staged crashes, massive settlements and “nuclear verdicts.”
Industry groups and lawsuit abuse critics told the Daily Caller News Foundation that costs from frivolous lawsuits and rising settlements are being passed down to consumers through elevated insurance premiums, higher transportation costs and inflated prices for everyday goods. They argue those costs are especially hitting the trucking industry, where rising commercial insurance premiums can ripple through freight rates, grocery bills, consumer goods and even personal auto insurance premiums.
“Abusive litigation practices against the trucking industry are driving up costs for consumers, destroying small businesses, and undermining public safety.” Henry Hanscom, American Trucking Association’s (ATA) chief advocacy & public affairs officer, told the DCNF.
Congress Takes Notes
The number of filed cases involving tractor-trailers has increased at an annual rate of 3.7% between 2014 and 2023, according to a study by the American Transportation Research Institute. This comes as the personal injury market size rose 2.5% CAGR between 2020 and 2025, according to IBIS World.
Auto insurance premiums have been rising since February 2020, and insurance premiums have soared by 55%, according to NPR.
The Surface Transportation Reauthorization Act is set to expire in September and is considered must-pass legislation, as it sets federal transportation funding and policy. ATA supports including several lawsuit-abuse measures in the package or another legislative route, though it remains unclear if lawmakers will include those reforms in the final bill.
ATA Chairman Greg Hodgen and a group of trucking industry members met with both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees in April to discuss lawsuit abuse targeting the industry, including staged accidents, forum shopping, third-party litigation funding and frivolous lawsuits, Hanscom told the DCNF.
After hearing about the surge in staged crashes and the roughly $4,200 a year it adds to the average family’s costs, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan said he wants to take a closer look at it.
A spokesperson from Jordan’s office confirmed to the DCNF that the Representative’s office is “looking into it.”
‘Hits Consumers’
In October 2025, Georgia Republican Rep. Mike Collins introduced the Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act of 2025, which aims to reduce frivolous suits in federal courts by imposing mandatory sanctions on attorneys who file them. It ends the 21-day “safe harbor” rule that allows attorneys to withdraw frivolous filings in that timeframe without consequences.
The bill has gained support from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and is pending before the House Judiciary Committee.
A similar version of the legislation was introduced in 2017, but it ended up dying in the Senate Judiciary Committee after passing the House.
The bill faced strong opposition from the American Bar Association (ABA) and the American Association for Justice (AAJ), where the two spent over $7 million lobbying in 2017, according to Open Secrets.
In September 2025, Congress introduced the FAIR Trucking Act, legislation that seeks to curb “nuclear verdicts” against the trucking industry. Nuclear verdicts are high jury awards in personal injury cases that can exceed $10 million, and can lead to bankruptcy for freight carriers. Nearly 80% of trucking-related verdicts exceed $1 million, according to an American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) report.
Since the introduction of the FAIR Trucking Act, the AAJ has lobbied heavily against the measure, according to lobbying reports obtained by the DCNF.
“The insurance industry raked in $169 billion in profits in 2024 while denying Americans’ claims after catastrophic events and jacking up rates for policyholders year after year,” AAJ spokesperson Heather Sager told the DCNF. “So, it’s no surprise they’re trying to point the finger at anyone willing to hold them to account.”
“This is a tale as old as time — for decades, corporations who can’t justify their treatment of American consumers attempt to blame those holding them accountable while pushing legislation that would shield them from accountability,” Sager added.
The risk of litigation is negatively affecting freight industry insurance, where settlements frequently reach millions of dollars. In 2025, some trucking companies experienced premium increases of 20-30% in just one year, according to FreightWaves.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court declined to limit freight broker liability in the Montgomery v. Caribe Transport case, which addressed whether freight brokers can be sued under state law for hiring unsafe motor carriers, leaving business groups warning that shipping companies could face a patchwork of state liability rules.
“Without a uniform standard, every small business who uses a trucking company will be hit with higher costs and reduced availability as the resulting patchwork of rules and risk ricochets through the supply chain,” Beth Milito, vice president and executive director of NFIB’s Small Business Legal Center, said in a press release following the decision.
The ruling leaves freight brokers facing state-by-state liability risks that could drive up insurance and shipping costs across the supply chain.
Hanscom said rising litigation costs have driven up commercial auto insurance premiums across the trucking industry, with liability insurance premiums increasing 18.6% between 2021 and 2024, “outpacing consumer inflation,” even as heavy-duty truck crash rates declined by as much as 3.1%.
“These soaring insurance costs year-over-year are putting enormous financial strain on trucking companies at a time when the industry is grappling with a prolonged freight recession,” he said. “It’s pushing many motor carriers to the brink.”
The trucking industry moves roughly 70% of U.S. goods, meaning higher freight insurance costs can spill over to consumers. Over the next decade, litigation is expected to contribute 15% of the inflation in food costs, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform.
The proposals include legislation that seeks to target staged highway accidents involving commercial trucks, forum shopping, frivolous lawsuits and third-party litigation funding.
The AAJ, the largest trial bar association, acting as the leading advocacy and lobbying organization for plaintiffs’ attorneys, stated that insurance companies and corporations are attempting to shift the blame for rising premium costs.
“Lawsuit abuse against the trucking industry hits consumers in two ways,” Hanscom told the DCNF. “Since virtually every good travels on the back of a truck at one point in time, increases in freight transportation costs are reflected in the cost of goods.”
Hanscom added that rising premiums in the commercial auto sector also “put upward pressure on the consumer auto insurance market.”
In 2023, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 837 into law, aiming to reduce frivolous lawsuits and insurance litigation by altering negligence standards, all in an attempt to combat high premiums.
The effects of the reform were felt rapidly, as the top five auto insurance groups saw an average rate decrease of 6.5%, according to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation.
As insurance premiums skyrocket nationwide, states are now signaling similar reforms to tort laws, including New York, where insurance rates rank among the fourth-highest in the nation.
“You can have a situation where someone causes the accident intentionally and gets a huge personal injury payout. So we’re putting the brakes on that fraud. Enough is enough here in the State of New York,” Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a statement released in February.
“We’ll start by reforming our tort laws to protect people who play by the rules and insulate the personal injury system from abuse,” Hochul added.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
