ATD’s Gelb Eyes Excise Tax Repeal After Environmental Wins
Federal Highway Bill Offers Opportunity for Long-Sought Action
Key Takeaways:
- In her first year leading American Truck Dealers, President Jacqueline Gelb touted federal environmental rollbacks, including pauses to EPA GHG3 and heavy-duty nitrogen oxide rules.
- The shift matters, as weak freight demand cut Class 8 sales 13.3% in 2025, and a California reversal ended zero-emission truck sales mandates.
- Looking ahead to 2026, Gelb aims to repeal the 12% excise tax that adds $20,000 to a new Class 8 tractor.
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American Truck Dealers President Jacqueline Gelb during her first year on the job saw her members score major regulatory wins, and she’s eyeing another Capitol Hill victory in the year ahead.
Gelb joined ATD on Dec. 9, 2024, after a stint as vice president of energy and environmental affairs for American Trucking Associations. Before that, the South Carolina native and Clemson graduate spent more than 11 years at International Motors.
“I may be one of the only people in the industry who has now sat in every single seat,” Gelb told Transport Topics in a December interview. “I’ve sat in the manufacturer’s seat, the fleet seat ... now the dealer side.” ATD represents more than 3,300 medium- and heavy-duty truck dealerships across the U.S.
Environmental Victories
While freight market weakness has chilled fleet demand for new trucks — Class 8 sales were down 13.3% through the first 11 months of 2025, per Wards Intelligence data — a key White House environmental policy shift promises to ease truck makers’ compliance requirements in the years ahead.
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“When we were sitting at this point last year, we were feeling that there was hope of what this year was going to look like from a regulatory front. And that’s exactly what we got,” Gelb said. “We have been able to secure some very big environmental wins for our industry in regards to providing certainty.”
PERSPECTIVE: ATD Drives Concerns Directly to D.C.
On the federal side, the Environmental Protection Agency applied the brakes to its Greenhouse Gas Emissions Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles rules, colloquially known as GHG3, as well as the latest Heavy-Duty Nitrogen Oxide rule. Those changes came after the Trump administration formally proposed scrapping the federal government’s authority to regulate GHG as an air pollutant by rolling back a landmark 2009 policy determination known as the endangerment finding.
“GHG3 is one of those big wins,” Gelb said. “It’s a win in the sense of that we had the administration come in very early on saying that they were going to do a review of the environmental regulations for our industry.”
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Gelb stressed the rollout of GHG3 was more proscriptive than collaborative, a departure from previous efforts.
“Market acceptance for us as the industry is a bunch of different points,” she said. “It’s got to have a return on investment. It’s got to be durable. You’ve got to be able to service it the right way. And most importantly, it’s got to be able to perform the duty of what that truck needs to perform for that customer.”
Gelb added, “We need regulations that provide certainty and that are achievable for us because that’s how investment decisions for each part of our industry get made. And that’s investment for manufacturers on technology. That’s investment for dealers of how they’re going to service trucks, how they’re going to support their customers. And that’s also an investment from the fleet side of what are they going to purchase and when are they going to purchase.”
California Rollback
The Trump administration’s reversal of an EPA policy that allowed California to set its own environmental rules led to the demise of a pair of state-specific regulations that set prescriptive requirements on the sale and deployment of zero-emissions trucks in the state. The move was a win for ATD members, Gelb said.
“We saw dealers suddenly see their sales drop by 80%. We saw dealers [who] were not able to get a diesel truck for a customer; they first had to sell an electric truck to unlock a diesel truck for a sale,” she said. “We had dealers that, for a good year and a half, were not selling new product. They were either selling used trucks, or they were really focusing on the maintenance side for servicing existing trucks on the road. And that doesn’t meet the goals for what California needs. California needs to get newer, cleaner trucks on the road, and that means you need to turn over your existing fleet. Making it harder to buy a new diesel truck to get an older truck off the road [is] just hurting their emissions side, their air quality.”
Next Up: Excise Tax Repeal
The 2026 congressional agenda includes a new surface transportation bill, a five-year legislative package that’s due for renewal. Gelb is looking to include repeal of a long-standing federal excise tax on the sale of new trucks in the bill.
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“It’s been a priority for a long time,” she said. “It’s a punitive 12% tax on the sale of a Class 8 truck or trailer. These are the [older] trucks that you want to turn over. These are the [newer] trucks that usually get the highest mileage.”
Per the , the excise tax costs trucking companies more than $20,000 for a typical new Class 8 tractor. Depending on the truck and trailer type, the tax on a new tractor and semitrailer could well exceed $40,000, ATRI said.
“Our customers right now are really in the mindset [that] it’s safer just to kind of sit and wait,” Gelb said. “Cash is key in times like this. The value proposition for the sale of a new truck is about putting the customer in the right truck but also making sure that it’s the truck that’s going to work for their business and deliver them [a] return on investment as a business capital investment.”
