Senator Joe Manchin, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has introduced a new bill that squashes a small loophole around the Inflation Reduction Act's (IRA) $7,500 EV tax credit. The new credits are restricted to cars with final assembly in the US, as well as those with a certain amount of North American battery content (an amount that increases every year). But, the U.S. Treasury has delayed its final rules on battery guidance until March, which means EVs with foreign batteries can still receive the full $7,500 in credits until then. Manchin's legislation, dubbed the American Vehicle Security Act (AVSA), would push the battery requirement back to January 1st.

“It is unacceptable that the U.S. Treasury has failed to issue updated guidance for the 30D electric vehicle tax credits and continues to make the full $7,500 credits available without meeting all of the clear requirements included in the Inflation Reduction Act," Manchin wrote a statement. "The Treasury Department failed to meet the statutory deadline of December 31, 2022, to release guidance for the 30D credit and have created an opportunity to circumvent stringent supply chain requirements included in the IRA. The IRA is first-and-foremost an energy security bill, and the EV tax credits were designed to grow domestic manufacturing and reduce our reliance on foreign supply chains for the critical minerals needed to produce EV batteries."

If it's passed, the bill would be disappointing news for anyone who rushed out to buy an EV before March (something plenty of car publications were suggesting). As Autoblog notes, the AVSA doesn't touch on the other IRA loophole, which also allows for the full credit for leased cars built outside of the US. But given Manchin's early obstruction to the IRA, as well as his push against lax battery rules, it wouldn't be surprising to see another bill in the works.

Massachusetts politicians are still pushing for better working conditions for ridesharing drivers. New bills in the state House and Senate would not only pursue collective bargaining rights across companies, as with past measures, but would guarantee a minimum wage, paid sick leave and other benefits. Companies like Uber and Lyft would also have to cover some driver expenses and pour money into the government's unemployment insurance system.

The new legislation wouldn't decide whether drivers are employees or independent contractors. However, Senate bill co-sponsor Jason Lewis told the State House News Service his bill would establish requirements that apply regardless of a driver's status. Previous bills would have tasked workers with negotiating for benefits that are now included, Lewis says.

Massachusetts sued Uber and Lyft in 2020 for allegedly misclassifying drivers as contractors and denying protections granted under state labor law. The companies responded with a proposed ballot measure that would have offered benefits in return for requiring that drivers be treated as contractors. The state's Supreme Judicial Court rejected that proposal last June.

We've asked Uber and Lyft for comment. In a statement, the Service Employees International Union (a bill proponent) says the bill "rewrites the rules" and gives condition drivers have sought for over a decade. The Massachusetts Coalition for Independent Work, an industry-run organization that opposes the legislation, previously claimed that measures granting employee status don't reflect a "vast majority" of drivers that want to remain contractors. The coalition prefers bills that would bring the anti-employee ballot proposal to the legislature as well as create portable benefit accounts.

The state has been one of the major battlegrounds for ridesharing work conditions, but it's only one part of a larger fight. Uber and New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission have fought over pay raises, while a California law meant to reclassify many gig economy workers as employees has faced unsuccessful attempts to carve out exemptions for companies like Uber and Lyft.

The contractors working on the Federal Aviation Administration's NOTAM system apparently deleted files by accident, leading to the delays and cancellations of thousands of US flights. If you'll recall, the FAA paused all domestic departures in the US on the morning of January 11th, because its NOTAM or Notice to Air Missions system had failed. NOTAMs typically contain important information for pilots, including warnings for potential hazards along a flight's route, flight restrictions and runway closures. 

While the FAA only paused departures on the 11th, US flights were already being pushed back the day before after the outage occurred at around 3:28PM ET. The issue even had an impact on military flights that partly relied on FAA NOTAMs: Pilots reportedly had to call around to ask for potential flight hazards themselves. 

The agency later reported that the system failed after "personnel who failed to follow procedures" damaged certain files. Now, it has shared more details as part of the preliminary findings of an ongoing investigation. Apparently, its contractors were synchronizing a main and a back-up database when they "unintentionally deleted files" that turned out to be necessary to keep the alert system running. It also reiterated what it said in the past that it has "so far found no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious intent." 

As The Washington Post notes, it's unclear at this point how deleting some files would cause the whole system to go down. The FAA had already fixed the problem and had taken steps to make the system more resilient, but the incident certainly puts the reliability of FAA's outdated technologies into question. The Transportation Department itself previously described the NOTAM system as "failing vintage hardware" in a budget document requesting $30 million to fund its upgrades.

What could become only the second lithium mine in the US received backing from the Biden administration this week. In an announcement spotted by Bloomberg, the Department of Energy said it would provide mining company Ioneer with a conditional loan valued at up to $700 million to develop the Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron Project in Nevada’s Esmeralda County. Once operational, the mine is expected to produce enough lithium for about 370,000 electric vehicles annually. Ioneer already has supply agreements with automakers like Ford and Toyota, though the project likely won’t start producing lithium until 2026.

The Biden administration made the funding available through the Energy Department’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program. To secure the money, Ioneer must obtain all the necessary permits from relevant state and federal agencies. The Center for Biological Diversity has come out against the project due to the risks it poses to a species of endangered wildflower in the area known as Tiehm’s buckwheat. The US Interior Department has yet to bless the project for that same reason. The Department of Energy said Ioneer revised its plans for the site to avoid direct impacts on the plant. However, it’s worth noting lithium mining requires a lot of water to carry out.

Still, the mineral is essential to many technologies needed to transition the world to a zero-emissions future. What’s more, lithium supply is expected to fall short of global demand by 2030. That gap will make it difficult for the Biden administration to meet its goal of ensuring half of all cars sold in the US by the end of the decade are electric vehicles.

While jurisdictions like California and New York move toward banning the sale of new gasoline-powered cars, one US state wants to go in the opposite direction. Wyoming’s legislature is considering a resolution that calls for a phaseout of new electric vehicle sales by 2035. Introduced on Friday, Senate Joint Resolution 4 has support from members of the state’s House of Representatives and Senate.

In the proposed resolution, a group of lawmakers led by Senator Jim Anderson says Wyoming’s “proud and valued” oil and gas industry has created “countless” jobs and contributed revenue to the state’s coffers. They add that a lack of charging infrastructure within Wyoming would make the widespread use of EVs “impracticable” and that the state would need to build “massive amounts of new power generation” to “sustain the misadventure of electric vehicles.”

SJ4 calls for residents and businesses to limit the sale and purchase of EVs voluntarily, with the goal of phasing them out entirely by 2035. If passed, the resolution would be entirely symbolic. In fact, it’s more about sending a message to EV advocates than banning the vehicles altogether. To that point, the final section of SJ4 calls for Wyoming’s Secretary of State to send President Biden and California Governor Gavin Newsom copies of the resolution.

“One might even say tongue-in-cheek, but obviously it’s a very serious issue that deserves some public discussion,” Senator Boner, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, told the Cowboy State Daily. “I’m interested in making sure that the solutions that some folks want to the so-called climate crisis are actually practical in real life. I just don’t appreciate when other states try to force technology that isn’t ready,” 

While the resolution has the markings of a political stunt, it does allude to genuine economic anxiety. Wyoming produced 85.43 million barrels of oil in 2021, making it the country’s eighth-largest crude oil producer that year. The state’s Carbon County is also home to one of the largest wind farms in the US. Something that’s not talked about enough when it comes to climate change is how the world transitions to a zero-emissions economy in an equitable way. People in many rural US states are rightfully mistrustful of so-called green technologies because they haven’t benefited from more recent technological shifts as much as their urban counterparts. Take the advent of the internet, for instance. In 2018, Microsoft found that many rural communities don’t have access to broadband internet. That’s something that has contributed to diminishing economic opportunities in those places.

On January 11th, the Federal Aviation Administration paused all domestic departures in the US after its Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system failed. The agency later revealed that the outage was caused by a database file that was damaged by "personnel who failed to follow procedures." Now, according to a new report from The Washington Post, the database failure also created issues for tools used by US military pilots. 

One of the affected systems was the Defense Internet NOTAM Service (DINS), which typically comes with FAA alerts regarding flight hazards. During the outage, military pilots were either getting NOTAMs in duplicates or not getting any at all. The Post said an FAA bulletin notified military users that the system had become "impaired and unreliable." Unlike civilian flights, which had to be grounded, military flights can proceed in situations like this. An Air Force spokesperson told the outlet that the military branch's pilots had to call around to ask for potential flight hazards themselves. 

The outage had also erased all NOTAMs submitted to the system starting on Tuesday afternoon, so airports and air traffic controllers were asked to re-submit them. Further, the FAA had to deal with delays and other challenges after the system went back up due to a "high system load."

The FAA is still verifying what caused the outage, but The Post said it's looking like the contractors truly made mistake and that there was no malicious intent behind their actions. Lawmakers are using this opportunity to put a spotlight on the FAA's outdated technology and to seek funding for upgrades. The computer system that failed and led to the outage is already three decades old, and according to CNN, it's also at least six years away from getting an upgrade. It remains to be seen if the incident will change that timeline.

Now that Republicans have control of the House of Representatives, they're hoping to set the agenda for crypto. Financial Services committee Chair Patrick McHenry (above) has announced a Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology and Inclusion that aims to set policy for technologies like cryptocurrency. Headed by Rep. French Hill, the panel hopes to establish "clear rules of the road" for federal regulators, create policies that bring financial technology to poorly served communities and bolster diversity and inclusiveness in digital assets.

In an interview with Politico, McHenry said he was creating the subcommittee to address a "big hole" in Financial Services' approach to crypto issues. McHenry considers crypto regulation his main legislative priority, and panel chair Hill has led the GOP's investigation of a potential central bank-backed cryptocurrency.

The move comes as regulators struggle to find common ground on crypto. While agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) agree that digital assets are subject to existing laws, there have been tussles over just who should step in and when. Senators put forward a bill that would create a clear regulatory framework, but it has been stuck in committee.

There's pressure on the House subcommittee to act. The implosion of crypto giant FTX has underscored the risks of letting the technology go unchecked. Officials are also investigating major industry names like Celsius and Coinbase over possible rule violations. Clearer rules would theoretically improve the federal government's responses to violations like these.

It's uncertain how effective the House panel will be. While there are crypto proponents across both main parties, the Democrats' expanded control of the Senate could prevent bills from becoming law if there are any substantial disagreements. Both sections of Congress have to pass and reconcile legislation before it reaches the President's desk. The very existence of the subcommittee suggests that Congress is taking crypto more seriously, however, and there's a chance it could accelerate bipartisan efforts to oversee digital money and tokens.

There wasn't anything particularly sinister about the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) outage that prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to ground US flights on Wednesday — it appears to have been a relatively simple glitch. As part of its early investigation, the FAA has determined that the outage was prompted by a "damaged database file." The agency is still working to identify the exact causes and prevent repeat incidents, but says there's still "no evidence" of a cyberattack.

The FAA grounded all domestic departures in the US on Wednesday morning after the NOTAM system failed the afternoon before. This was the first such failure in the country, and it prompted hundreds of delays that took hours to resolve. NOTAMs provide important information about potential problems along a flight's path, such as runway closures and temporary airspace restrictions.

The initial findings may be reassuring for those concerned the outage may have stemmed from another critical infrastructure hack. However, it still leaves some unanswered questions about the fragility of NOTAM in the US. A single corrupted file was apparently all it took to disrupt flights nationwide for over half a day — whatever redundancy was in place clearly wasn't enough.

In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, President Joe Biden has called on Democrats and Republicans who are sitting in Congress to set aside their differences and work on strong bipartisan legislation to keep major technology companies in check — without calling any businesses out by name. While he said he was proud of the success of the American tech industry, Biden expressed concern about how some actors "collect, share and exploit our most personal data, deepen extremism and polarization in our country, tilt our economy’s playing field, violate the civil rights of women and minorities and even put our children at risk."

Biden has pinpointed three areas that he says require reform, starting with privacy. He argued that "serious federal protections" are needed in this area, including "clear limits on how companies can collect, use and share highly personal data," such as location, browsing history and communications, as well as health, biometric and genetic data. Biden says companies shouldn't be collecting much of that data at all.

"These protections should be even stronger for young people, who are especially vulnerable online," Biden wrote. "We should limit targeted advertising and ban it altogether for children." Just yesterday, Meta said Facebook and Instagram could still target teens with ads based on their age and location, but not their gender.

In discussing the need for "Big Tech companies to take responsibility for the content they spread and the algorithms they use," the president reiterated his belief that lawmakers should reform Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which protects online platforms from liability for what their users do. In the leadup to the 2020 election, Biden claimed that he would see Section 230 "revoked, immediately" if he became president. While that hasn't happened yet, senators and members of Congress have introduced several bills over the last few years with the aim of curtailing Section 230.

Meanwhile, Biden demanded much more transparency from major tech companies about the algorithms they use "to stop them from discriminating, keeping opportunities away from equally qualified women and minorities, or pushing content to children that threatens their mental health and safety." Algorithmic bias has been a hot-button issue in some circles for many years. Some, for instance, incorrectly believed that Twitter's algorithms were biased against conservative perspectives. Elected officials have made several attempts to make tech companies accountable for algorithmic bias too.

Senators have also expressed concern that platforms haven't done enough to protect children. A bipartisan bill submitted last February sought to give children more privacy and safety protections on social media while requiring platforms to minimize their exposure to content concerning things like self-harm, eating disorders, sexual exploitation and alcohol.

The third area Biden wants to focus on is bolstering competition in the tech industry. "When tech platforms get big enough, many find ways to promote their own products while excluding or disadvantaging competitors — or charge competitors a fortune to sell on their platform," he wrote. "My vision for our economy is one in which everyone — small and midsized businesses, mom-and-pop shops, entrepreneurs — can compete on a level playing field with the biggest companies."

Biden called for legislators to offer upstart companies a chance to succeed by bringing in fairer rules. "The next generation of great American companies shouldn’t be smothered by the dominant incumbents before they have a chance to get off the ground," he argued.

The president also noted that his "administration has made strong progress in promoting competition throughout the economy, consistent with my July 2021 executive order." At that time, he urged the Federal Communications Commission to undo the previous administration's dismantling of net neutrality and said that mergers would face more scrutiny. However, there's only so much the executive branch can do.

"We need bipartisan action from Congress to hold Big Tech accountable. We’ve heard a lot of talk about creating committees. It’s time to walk the walk and get something done," Biden concluded. "There will be many policy issues we disagree on in the new Congress, but bipartisan proposals to protect our privacy and our children; to prevent discrimination, sexual exploitation and cyberstalking; and to tackle anticompetitive conduct shouldn’t separate us. Let’s unite behind our shared values and show the nation we can work together to get the job done."

Following the 2022 midterm election, Biden is now contending with a split Congress. Democrats managed to hang onto control of the Senate but lost the House to the Republicans. That will make it more difficult for Biden to carry out his agenda. By publishing an op-ed in a major newspaper, he'll be looking to earn support from the public on these issues and put pressure on Republicans to acquiesce.

The Federal Communications Commission isn't done dragging data breach policy into the modern era. The agency has proposed rules that would improve reporting for breaches at carriers. Most notably, the move would scrap a mandatory wait of seven business days before a telecom can warn customers about a security incident. Hackers would have a shorter window of opportunity to abuse your data without your knowledge, to put it another way.

The proposal would also clarify that carriers must notify the FCC, FBI and Secret Service of any reportable data breaches. Providers would likewise have to alert customers to inadvertent breaches, such as leaving account info exposed. The Commission is simultaneously asking for public input on whether or not breach alerts should include specific information to help people take action. such as the nature of the compromised data.

The FCC isn't shy about its reasoning behind the tentative rule change. The existing rules are more than 15 years old, and are reportedly "out-of-step" at a time where it's frequently vital to notify victims and authorities as quickly as possible. In theory, telecoms will warn users sooner and reduce the chances of identity fraud and follow-up hacks. This won't guarantee timely alerts, but it could minimize the damage for both customers and the networks' bottom line. It's also more consistent with other laws on breach reporting, particularly in states like California.

There are potential problems. The proposed rule change would let federal agencies delay customer warnings for an initial period of up to 30 days if the notice might jeopardize a criminal investigation or national security. That could put the general public at risk. The FCC is also wondering whether or not there should be a ceiling on the notification period, and whether smaller carriers should get more time to report intrusions. Public comments (open 30 days after the proposal reaches the Federal Register) may help shape these rules, but there's no guarantee the end result will address every concern.