Infrastructure and Transportation Update - July 2023

California

As a historic 10-day heat wave threatened brownouts across California last summer, a small San Diego County school district did its part to help: It captured excess power from its electric school buses and sent it back to the state’s overwhelmed grid…

On Monday, 7/10, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a package of infrastructure bills that aim to cut the red tape associated with building new projects, while also ensuring environmental protection…

 In the heart of Silicon Valley, leaders are calling on the best and the brightest minds. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan's office has partnered with tinyML Foundation, Sony and San Jose's Department of Transportation to launch a global traffic safety hackathon…

President and Administration

The world is on track to manufacture enough electric vehicle batteries to meet expected demand requirements in 2030 under a net-zero emissions by mid-century scenario, according to new tracking from the International Energy Agency…

On Thursday, 7/20, Politico Pro sat down with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to talk about matters before his department, including the fight over adding flights at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Tesla’s inroads into the electric vehicle charging industry and high-speed rail…

More major cities in the United States are letting public transit riders hop on board for free. Kansas City; Raleigh; Richmond; Olympia; Tucson; Alexandria, Virginia; and other cities are testing dropping fares on their transit systems…

Smartphone apps have become commonplace tools for travel and navigation…

Ridesharing has become a convenient way of life, but that's not so for everyone…

With billions of federal dollars in the hands of local officials to fix the nation’s roads, bridges and water systems, it is no surprise that infrastructure is at the top of many mayors’ agendas…

Congress

Four Senate Republicans are challenging the Biden administration’s waiver of Buy America rules for electric vehicle chargers, saying that the waiver would allow China to profit from the U.S. EV boom…

The backstop mechanism House Republicans inserted into last month’s debt ceiling package to ensure the completion of full-year appropriations would cause some collateral damage if triggered: cuts to bipartisan infrastructure law funding enacted two years ago…

After committees approved versions of a fiscal 2024 transportation funding bill, Congress is unlikely to clear the legislation before its August recess…

Weekly Update 7/31/23

Appropriations

The Senate Appropriations Subcommittees passed all 12 funding bills…

California

California is preparing to overhaul the way its schools teach math with new state guidelines, a 1,000-page effort that’s drawn both staunch support and fierce criticism over the nearly four years it’s taken to produce…

The 22nd Century Group launched sales of its VLN King low-nicotine cigarettes in California…

For the second time in two years, a coalition of advocates wants to make high-quality education a constitutional right in California…

California is facing a housing shortage and topped the nation in terms of housing underproduction in 2019, at nearly 978,000 units, according to a study by the nonprofit housing group Up For Growth…

Stretching several blocks in West Oakland, the Wood Street encampment became a community for those who had little else…

President and Administration

The Biden administration is proposing to boost a 2008 law that established so-called mental health parity by establishing more stringent requirements for health plans…

The Food and Drug Administration has scheduled a virtual listening session entitled "Public Meeting and Listening Session for Developing FDA's Center for Tobacco Products' Strategic Plan”…

President Biden called on the Senate to pass kids online safety and privacy bills — which continues to put the pressure on Congress to advance stronger online protections for children…

On Thursday, 7/27, the U.S. Departments of Education and Labor announced a series of new efforts to expand Registered Apprenticeships for educators and invest in teacher preparation programs…

On Tuesday, 7/25, The Biden-Harris Administration announced the launch of the Unlocking Pathways Summit series, a key part of the Raise the Bar: Unlocking Career Success initiative, aimed at helping young Americans access good-paying jobs created by President Biden’s Bidenomics agenda…

Today, 7/31, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona issued the following statement on the new chief of staff for the U.S. Department of Education: “I am thrilled to have Lexi Barrett, a trusted advisor who already commands tremendous respect throughout the U.S. Department of Education, step into this new role as chief of staff…

The Biden administration announced a new strategy last week to help lower housing costs and boost supply…

On Friday, 7/28, CMS said that hackers had accessed 612,000 Medicare beneficiaries’ data, including Social Security numbers and medical records…

Congress
On Thursday, 7/27, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), the chair of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, threatened to issue subpoenas to compel the Biden administration to turn over information about how it plans to restart federal student loan payments this fall…

Education

Red-state breakthroughs in the battle for universal Education Savings Accounts have garnered much media attention, but a different string of recent school choice victories is likely to have an even bigger and better impact on disadvantaged children…

On Monday, 7/17, New York’s Board of Regents unanimously passed new regulations preventing teachers from restraining students face down or isolating them alone in rooms they can’t leave…

 A New Jersey school district has agreed to pay $9.1 million to the parents of a sixth grader who died by suicide in 2017, ending a lawsuit that accused administrators of failing to take bullying complaints seriously…

Weekly Update 7/24/23

Appropriations

The House intends to approve two of the funding bills, and then will try to pass as many of the remaining 10 as possible in September…

On Thursday, 7/27, the Senate Appropriations Committee is expected to mark up several bills, including the FY2024 Defense spending bill, FY2024 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (LHHS) spending bill, and FY2024 Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies spending bill…

California

A lesser-known Biden administration plan for student loan payment relief could wipe $2.96 billion in debt from the accounts of some 62,000 Californian borrowers, according to state-level data recently released by the administration…

President and Administration

The Federal Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved a smoking cessation tool in more than a decade, leading many experts to question its strategy to help Americans reduce the leading cause of preventable cancer…

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) today, 7/24, released updated policy guidance, which takes immediate effect, to ensure and strengthen the rights and protections guaranteed to children with disabilities and their families under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)…

Congress

The Senate Appropriations Committee approved three more fiscal 2024 funding measures on Thursday, 7/20, two of which—those funding the departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development, as well as the Energy Department—received unanimous, 29-0 votes…

House Republicans opposed to limits on deductions for state and local taxes are making their first stand in a move that could test their newfound power in the GOP conference…

Public Safety and Justice Update: 7/21/23

Families of two teens, with the help of the anti-gun-violence group Everytown for Gun Safety, are suing the distributor of the parts 18-year-old Zachary Burkard used to make a ghost gun, 80P Builder of Florida, and the manufacturer, Polymer80 of Nevada, for gross negligence in providing a teenager with a weapon when he was not legally able to buy a handgun from a federally licensed dealer…

This year to date has been the deadliest six months of mass killings recorded since at least 2006…

In 2008, the Supreme Court struck down a gun control law, ruling the 2nd Amendment protected the “right of law-abiding, responsible citizens” to keep a handgun at home for self-defense…

A civilian agency could take over all investigations into complaints about Oakland police officers’ alleged misconduct and excessive use of force under a proposal that would effectively eradicate the police department’s internal affairs function…

The city of Antioch is resisting subpoenas for at least five of its police officers called to testify about racism and alleged crimes within the department, claiming the officers are out on injury leave and therefore unavailable…

San Jose’s gun liability insurance requirement — the first-of-its-kind in America and upheld by a federal court judge last week — will make the city safer from gun-related violence, its proponents assert…

Cecilia Ashe, Police Chief in Milford, Delaware, was one of three law enforcement experts on gun violence who participated in a recent National Institute of Justice (NIJ) podcast on evidence-based, scientifically sound methods to reduce gun violence in communities…

A new report finds the California State University (CSU) system mishandled years of sexual misconduct claims, calling it an '"institutional betrayal”…

Former president Donald Trump said this week he had received a letter from special counsel Jack Smith informing him that he is the target of the Justice Department’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol…

Weekly Update 7/17/23

Appropriations

House Republicans are planning to slash the Education Department’s budget by at least 15 percent, though Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee say the cuts are closer to 30 percent…

On Friday, 7/14, House Republicans appropriators approved their funding bill for the departments of Commerce and Justice in a subcommittee…

On Friday, 7/14, a House Appropriations subcommittee advanced a $147 billion spending package by voice vote that would slash funding for health agencies and eliminate some altogether…

On Tuesday, 7/11, House Republicans released their fiscal 2024 THUD spending bill, which represents an overall cut of 25 percent below current funding levels when accounting for offsets…

Republicans on a House Appropriations subcommittee advanced a spending bill on Thursday, 7/13, to slash fiscal 2024 budgets for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Interior Department…

On Thursday, 7/13, Senate appropriators unanimously approved their fiscal 2024 bill to fund the Treasury Department, Internal Revenue Services (IRS) and other agencies, sending the $16.9 billion measure to the floor…

California

California may make it harder to ban books in public schools — as it dives into the contentious, national debate pitting the First Amendment against conservative values…

President and Administration

 In 2019, residents of Evanston, a city just north of Chicago, committed to spend $10 million over 10 years on local reparations for Black residents…

 One year after the rollout of the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its 988 Lifeline partners announced the addition of Spanish text and chat services…

Federal Communications Commission Chair Jessica Rosenworcel is proposing a $200 million program to harden school cybersecurity as major districts struggle to recover from targeted attacks that have occurred since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic…

Applicants for grants from the Department of Health and Human Services would face more scrutiny about their nondiscrimination policies under a proposal announced by HHS’s Office for Civil Rights on Tuesday, 7/11…

In a recent report, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said that the disparity in maternal mortality among Black women compared with white women across nine countries in the Americas is the starkest in the U.S. Black women and girls are three times more likely to die while giving birth or within six weeks of giving birth than non-Afro-descendent and non-Hispanic women, the UNFPA said…

On Friday, 7/14, the Department of Education began notifying more than 804,000 borrowers that they have a total of $39 billion in Federal student loans that will be automatically discharged in the coming weeks…

According to provisional data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of people dying of drug overdoses in the U.S. was nearly the same between February 2022 and February 2023 as it was during that period the previous year…

Congress

A subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced the Support for Patients and Communities Reauthorization Act to the full panel via voice vote on Thursday, 7/13…

On Tuesday, 7/11, House Education and Workforce Chair Virginia Foxx (R-NC) and Ranking Member Bobby Scott (D-VA) unveiled a bipartisan health care package of four bills focused on transparency in health care, including for hospitals and pharmacy benefit managers…

Education

Wisconsin schools reported almost 6,000 seclusion and 7,000 restraint incidents with a majority of the incidents involving students with disabilities during the 2021-2022 school year, according to a report by the state Department of Public Instruction (DPI)…

Oklahoma’s attorney general is preparing to buck some fellow Republicans and challenge the nation’s first public religious charter school…

According to new data, pandemic recovery has essentially stalled for most of the nation’s students, and upper elementary and middle school students actually lost ground this year in reading and math…