Most of them have an in house trainer that has submitted their training outline to the state and are approved to train their own employees. The gov isn't paying themselves 5k to send anyone to school to drive a truck.
Go work for a shitty paying government agency local to you (local municipal, state highway dept). The cdl will be free pass the test then walk out. The shitty part will be doing the onboarding shit with hr knowing your not staying.
No matter where you get it now it's flirting with the 3k mark after tax. I would think someone that is going to drop that on a scope would just come up with the extra thou or so and do what they were thinking about anyway.