ICYMI: Chairman Hawley Sounds the Alarm on America’s Fire Truck Crisis

ICYMI: Chairman Hawley Sounds the Alarm on America's Fire Truck Crisis

Friday, September 12, 2025

Chairman Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ranking Member Andy Kim (D-N.J.) held a hearing in the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Disaster Management that revealed private equity's role in the growing equipment crisis facing fire departments across the country. The hearing featured fire chiefs, union presidents, and industry leaders alike.

For the better part of 20 years, private-equity firms have made a business out of buying up independent firetruck manufacturers-to the point where just three major companies command 70-80 percent of the entire fire apparatus market.

"Your profits have grown five times over the last five years to 250 million dollars, but nobody can get their equipment," the Senator said to an executive of the REV Group, a company formed by a private-equity firm in 2006.

"Before, a new fire engine order took between six months and a year, standard, to get delivered. Today, those orders take two years on the low end, four years on the high end," Senator Hawley explained, pointing to corporate manufacturers' anticompetitive practices as reason for the egregious delivery delays over the past five years.

Kansas City's Fire Chief Dennis Rubin testified that his department was forced to improvise for months in Chevy Suburbans with firefighting equipment tossed in the trunks due to fire engine delivery delays.

"I just want to say to our corporate friends, you know, you don't have to wait for prosecution, or for a study, or for anything else to do the right thing," Senator Hawley urged industry witnesses. " . . . In the meantime, I hope that we'll see some action on the part of this body and the FTC and anybody else who has a piece of it to make sure that this industry begins to function again for the people of this country and the firefighters who keep it safe," he concluded.

Senators Hawley and Kim previously sent a letter to industry leaders, warning that their anticompetitive business models had thinned fire station fleets, increased overall costs for departments, and degraded fire response readiness.

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