American Trucking Associations
organization

The American Trucking Associations (ATA), founded in 1933, is the largest national trade association for the trucking industry. ATA represents more than 37,000 members covering every type of motor carrier in the United States through a federation of other trucking groups, industry-related conferences, and its 50 affiliated state trucking associations. Former Governor of Kansas Bill Graves was replaced by Chris Spear as the ATA's president and CEO in July 2016.
According to its website the ATA's mission is to "develop, advocate, and advance innovative research-based policies that promote highway safety, security, environmental sustainability and profitability."
History
On September 23, 1933, the American Trucking Associations was established as a national affiliation of state trucking organizations. The ATA was established by a merger of the American Highway Freight Association and the Federated Trucking Associations of America.
The ATA began with a staff of eight working from a three-room suite in the Transportation Building in Washington, D.C. During World War II the Army requested that ATA recruit personnel for two quartermaster regiments to constitute the U.S.Army Transportation Corps. With calls to the 350 members of the ATA's Trucking Service War Council, 5,700 trucking industry employees volunteered for enlisted positions and 258 volunteered for officer commissions. After the war the ATA was in the forefront of the groups and industries supporting Dwight D. Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System.
The American Trucking Association has worked on regulatory issues from the Code of Fair Competition in 1934 to the eventual deregulation of the industry.
The ATA's headquarters are in Washington, D.C..
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “American Trucking Associations” as organization. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as organization. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4745283. VIAF identifies the subject as 155663918. The Library of Congress control number is n79086443. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1933, 2016 and 1934.
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This entry incorporates text from “American Trucking Associations” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.