§ 382.103 hangs the whole program off the license rather than off the vehicle. It applies to service agents — the outside providers an employer uses to perform or coordinate its testing — and to every person — and every employer of such a person — who operates a commercial motor vehicle in commerce in any State and is subject to the commercial driver’s license requirements of Part 383, the Licencia Federal de Conductor requirements in Mexico, or the commercial driver’s license requirements of the Canadian National Safety Code. If Chapter 3 put you inside Part 383, this part reaches you. Two consequences are worth having early. An employer who employs themselves as a driver must comply with the employer requirements AND the driver requirements, and an employer who employs only themselves must run a random testing program with a pool of two or more covered employees — which is the rule quietly telling an owner-operator that a pool of one is not a program. And § 382.103(c) closes the door § 2.5 left open on the safety regulations: the § 390.3T(f) exceptions do not apply to this part, and the employers and drivers named there must comply with it unless § 382.103(d) says otherwise.

Everything the program does keys off one definition, and it is broader than driving. A safety-sensitive function under § 382.107 is all time from when a driver begins work, or is required to be in readiness to work, until relieved from work and all responsibility for performing work — the same shape as the on-duty definition Chapter 7 built the hours around. The section then names what it includes: waiting to be dispatched at a plant, terminal, facility or other property unless relieved from duty; inspecting, servicing or conditioning a commercial motor vehicle at any time; time at the driving controls; all time in or upon a commercial motor vehicle other than driving, except resting in a sleeper berth; loading and unloading, supervising or assisting with it, attending a vehicle being loaded or unloaded, remaining in readiness to operate it, or giving and receiving receipts; and all time repairing, obtaining assistance for, or remaining in attendance upon a disabled vehicle. A driver who thinks of the program as covering the hours they are behind the wheel has understated it by most of the working day.

Two more definitions decide cases. Driver means any person who operates a commercial motor vehicle, and § 382.107 spells out that this includes full-time, regularly employed drivers, casual, intermittent or occasional drivers, leased drivers and independent owner-operator contractors — the same reach § 2.5 found in the safety regulations, said again here so nobody argues about it. Actual knowledge is narrower than it sounds: for the purposes of subpart B it means an employer’s knowledge that a driver has used alcohol or controlled substances based on the employer’s direct observation of the employee, information from a previous employer, a traffic citation for driving a commercial motor vehicle under the influence, or the employee’s own admission — and direct observation there means observing the USE, not observing behavior or physical characteristics, which is the separate trigger for reasonable suspicion testing in § 9.3. Finally, § 382.111 preserves what sits outside all of this: except as the part expressly provides, nothing in it affects an employer’s authority or a driver’s rights with respect to alcohol or controlled substances, including testing and rehabilitation. A carrier policy stricter than the federal program is not this program, and a violation of one is not automatically a violation of the other.