The Trump administration is continuing its pushback against state artificial intelligence laws that it views as ideologically biased, proposing a new Federal Trade Commission policy.

The proposed policy statement, which is open for public comment through July 31, would affect how the FTC regulates AI companies. The agency said it’s meant to address concerns that “AI companies that distort their systems’ outputs to achieve undisclosed ideological objectives” could be deceiving consumers in violation of federal law.

“The FTC wants to hear from businesses and consumers about their experiences and concerns regarding the subversion of AI systems for ideological ends,” Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson said in a statement.

The proposal specifically mentions a first-of-its-kind Colorado law that had banned “algorithmic discrimination,” or AI output that might lead to decisions disfavoring people on jobs, loans or healthcare based on their race, religion, gender and other protected categories. But the Colorado legislature already has repealed that provision. The revamped law instead focuses on regulating technology that results in “consequential decisions” for consumers. 

The controversial law prompted a lawsuit from xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, which the U.S. Department of Justice supported.

In December 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order targeting state AI laws, including creation of a Department of Justice AI Litigation Task Force to challenge state AI laws. His order also directed the FTC to issue a policy statement on regulation of state laws that “require alterations to the truthful outputs of AI models.” 

Stateline asked the FTC if there were any state and city laws that officials felt were currently in violation of federal laws, but received no response.

Tyler Thompson, a Denver-based lawyer with firm Reed Smith who tracks emerging technology law, said the FTC proposal is important because it raises the possibility that companies could face deceptive-practices claims based on how they tune, weight or steer AI models, which could also prompt state policy on the issue.

“Just the fact that companies could be tweaking their models and that could lead to a deceptive trade practice, I think is huge news,” Thompson said.

Thompson believes the legal battle and the FTC’s focus on restricting similar laws will lead to “a more niche” policy focus on AI – such as deepfakes, nonconsensual sexual content, children’s safety, companion chatbots and data centers — areas where there is bipartisan agreement.

Noah M. Kenney, founder and principal consultant of Digital 520, an AI governance, security and privacy consultancy, who also responded to the FTC’s request for public comment, said the proposed statement carries more political pressure rather than being an enforceable federal regulation.

“The real effect of this statement is signaling and pressure, not legal preemption, especially paired with the December executive order’s AI litigation task force.”

Kenney said there is also an irony in the federal government’s argument.

“A federal effort to dictate what counts as a ‘neutral’ or ‘accurate’ output raises its own First Amendment concerns about compelled speech,” he said.

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.

Dozens of public housing authorities, tribes, property owners and community groups have joined a new coalition organized by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to promote work requirements and time limits for people who receive federal housing help.

HUD is currently finalizing a rule that would allow public housing authorities and property owners who participate in federal housing voucher programs to impose work requirements and time limits on work-ready adults, or working-age adults (younger than 62) who are not disabled.

The federal agency says members of the coalition support the idea of giving housing authorities and providers discretion to require work of up to 40 hours per week for nonelderly, nondisabled adults, supplementing those rules with job training and other supportive services.

HUD argues that current housing policies discourage work and self-sufficiency, and extend the amount of time that people remain on housing assistance. In a social media post, Public and Indian Housing Assistant Secretary Ben Hobbs said the new requirements could generate over $500 million in new resident income.

In 2023, 31% of the people receiving federal housing assistance were nonelderly, nondisabled adults. Of that group, 44% were working and 56% were not, according to a 2025 report by the Congressional Research Service.

More than a hundred public housing authorities, tribes, property owners and community groups have joined the Work & Dignity Coalition, according to HUD. The National Housing Law Project, a nonprofit that advocates for more low-income housing, produced a list of 58 entities, including the public housing authorities in Fort Worth, Jacksonville, Orlando, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Tampa.

Less than 1% of public housing authorities, known as Moving-to-Work agencies, are currently allowed to impose time limits or work requirements on people receiving housing assistance. HUD cites Champaign County, Illinois — which requires each able-bodied adult to work or be in school for at least 15 hours per week, and each household to generate 30 hours of work income at the minimum wage.

“I think that the important thing to note is that this is all about self-sufficiency, even if there might be some fear over what is required and how that would affect their housing,” said Peyton Pannell-Johnson, a spokesperson for the Housing Authority of Champaign County. “There is a team that needs to connect people to work, and then a team that follows up with each client.”

But housing advocates argue that the proposed requirements will make it more difficult for people to keep their housing assistance. The Congressional Research Service also warned in its 2025 report that imposing work requirements on federal aid recipients often trips up people who are working already.

“Work requirements can increase the burden for working recipients to prove that they remain eligible for benefits by requiring that they produce additional or more frequent information about their wages and hours,” the research agency stated. “There is an inherent tension between helping families meet their basic needs and promoting work in low-income assistance programs.”

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org

Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Grants Pass v. Johnson decision  — which allowed governments to enforce public camping bans without violating the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment — more than 350 cities and 14 states have adopted laws or measures to crack down on street homelessness.

States have varied in their approaches toward street homelessness since the 2024 ruling, including imposing statewide camping bans on public lands, setting mandates for local governments to enforce those bans and, in some cases, allowing property owners to sue their local government if they do not comply with enforcement of statewide camping bans, according to details gathered by the National Homelessness Law Center.

This year, Louisiana made unauthorized public camping a crime and created a Homelessness Court program, where an unhoused person charged with a crime could seek treatment as an alternative to jail time. Indiana’s new law, which bans unauthorized camping, sleeping and sheltering on state or local public land, goes into effect in July. 

Georgia and Oklahoma enacted Safe Neighborhood laws, which allow property owners to seek compensation from local governments if they fail to enforce laws tied to public camping, loitering and panhandling. Some measures have been modeled after legislation drafted by groups such as the conservative think tanks Cicero Institute and the Goldwater Institute.

There were fewer homeless people in the United States on a single night in January 2025 than in January 2024, but homelessness increased in 28 states, according to the latest federal count. 

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.

States and cities are loosening building code requirements in an effort to lower construction costs and boost affordable housing.

Some of these changes include allowing low-rise apartment buildings to have just one stairway, reducing how often building codes are updated and rolling back specific electrical or fire safety standards.

But critics have raised safety concerns, noting that existing rules were shaped by past tragedies and aim to prevent future harm.

For example, having only one staircase could allow a developer to add another unit or expand the size of units, said Nicolle Aube, principal and founder of Civex, a planning and civil engineering consulting firm, and an American Planning Association board member.

“But then there’s this flip side, that by removing these codes and protections, it carries this additional risk for the developer and the occupants of the building if the worst-case scenario happens,” she said.

Many states are considering single-stairway apartment laws.

They generally take one of four approaches, said Alex Horowitz, housing policy director at The Pew Charitable Trusts: begin with a study, allow single-stairway buildings statewide, update the state building code while letting local governments opt out, or give localities authority to allow them. Pew has lobbied for and testified in favor of the changes.

Two national developments could make it easier for more states and cities to allow single-stairway buildings, Horowitz said.

The first are proposed updates by the International Code Council, the organization that develops the model codes many states use as the basis for their building rules. An update to its multifamily code, for example, would allow single-stairway buildings to add a fourth story.

Second, the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act moving through Congress would direct the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to develop model guidelines for residential buildings with a single stairway not exceeding six stories.

According to Pew, 19 states and Washington, D.C., introduced bills between 2022 and 2025 to study or allow single-stairway apartment buildings, and seven states passed them in 2025 alone.

This year, Idaho enacted a new law that allows local governments to permit certain apartment buildings to use one stairway — generally up to six stories without an occupiable roof, or five stories with one, along with limits on units per floor, sprinklers, stair width, and smoke and fire detection.

Colorado’s law enacted last year requires certain municipalities to modify their building codes by Dec. 1, 2027, to allow five-story multifamily residential buildings to be served by a single exit. Texas’ 2025 law lets municipalities authorize single-stairway apartment buildings up to six stories.

Colorado state Rep. Andrew Boesenecker, a Democrat who sponsored the new law, came to this issue because the state needed to find a way to make smaller multifamily projects more feasible. He said the policy can help on infill lots where a traditional two-stairway apartment building may not fit.

“Single stairway or smart stairway buildings are not only a very safe way to build multi-family housing, they also bring a product to market that’s just not being offered,” Boesenecker said.

Colorado is one 16 states without a statewide building code, making local implementation a major focus. Boesenecker said lawmakers had to look at “ways that you can make it feasible through local governments to adopt this standard into their building code.”

He said the work to get the support of those skeptical of single-staircase legislation happened a year prior to the bill’s passage, when lawmakers worked with fire chiefs, fire marshals and firefighters’ unions for about a year to get them to a “neutral position” on the bill.

In Texas, Democratic state Sen. Nate Johnson said the law he sponsored will allow for architectural innovation as well as maximizing multi-family housing on odd-shaped and smaller lots.

Johnson said modernizing building codes does not come at the risk of safety.

“Who knows what policies once served well and now, after decades of technological advances and changes in land use, impede good design?” Johnson said. “We have regulations for a reason, and I’m not for throwing out what protects the public. Markets tend to easily meet the challenges of sound regulatory protections.”

Lawmakers in Illinois, New York and Rhode Island considered single-stairway bills this year, but none passed before the legislatures adjourned for the year.

But moving in the opposite direction, Connecticut lawmakers this year repealed the single-stairway law they had passed in 2024, after objections from fire safety officials.

Beyond staircases, Horowitz, of Pew, said this year saw the first legislative sessions in which states have taken a look at elevators to reduce building costs. Washington state enacted a new elevator law this year that directs the state’s Building Code Council to allow smaller apartment buildings, with at most six stories and 24 units, to use smaller and less expensive passenger elevators.

Maine removed some elevator-related requirements, including for certain smoke and draft equipment and for two-way emergency video communication systems inside elevators.

Research by the Center for Building in North America, a nonprofit research group that co-authored Pew’s single-stairway report, found that installing elevators in the United States and Canada is at least three times as expensive as in Western Europe or East Asia. U.S. and Canadian installations start around $150,000, compared with roughly $50,000 in several high-income countries, the group found.

Is it safe?

Pew researchers found that modern four- to six-story single-stairway apartment buildings can be as safe as other residential buildings when they include fire-safety features such as sprinklers, smoke detectors, code-compliant drywall, self-closing doors and protected stairways.

Horowitz said Pew researchers counted every fire death in New York City and Seattle — two cities that have long allowed single-stairway apartment buildings — over 12 years.

In New York City, Pew identified 4,440 modern single-stairway buildings and found their fire-death rate was the same as other residential buildings — about five deaths per million occupant-years. Pew also found that the deaths it identified in modern single-stair buildings appeared to occur in the unit where the fire started, not because smoke or fire penetrated the single stairway.

“Modern apartment buildings are much, much, much safer than other housing. It is not even close,” Horowitz said. “The data is clear and policymakers are following the data in this instance.”

But Sean DeCrane, the director of fire fighter health and safety operational services for the International Association of Fire Fighters, said single-stairway proposals often fail to account for residents’ potential slowness to evacuate during a fire, and how firefighters use the same stairwell to reach trapped occupants.

The IAFF cites as one example a Manhattan apartment fire on May 4 that killed three people and injured 14. The fire that trapped residents in a smoke-filled stairwell serving as the building’s only means of escape. IAFF says the fire appeared to start on the first floor and spread upward through the stairwell.

“When we take over the stairwell, occupant egress effectively stops,” DeCrane told Stateline. “So now you’re requiring firefighters to physically remove occupants out of a burning building.”

During a fire, residents may not leave when an alarm first sounds, he said, especially in apartment buildings where false alarms or smoke alarms from a kitchen mishap are common. Some residents do not try to evacuate until they smell smoke or believe they are in danger.

“Just because they hear an alarm doesn’t necessarily signify risk to them.”

Aube, of the American Planning Association, said state lawmakers should learn from California’s approach — which in 2023 directed the state fire marshal to study single-stair buildings — before lawmakers make building codes changes.

“There is a lot of technical information that lawmakers and the public need to learn before considering removing a code,” she said.

The California Office of the State Fire Marshal released that report early this year. It said safeguards such as sprinkler and smoke detectors “do not fully substitute” for having two stairwells and notes that fire departments in the state nearly unanimously oppose single stairways. But it suggested a variety of measures that should be implemented if single-stairway buildings are allowed.

Electrical codes

In recent years, some states have changed parts of their fire and electrical codes, seeking to make a dent in the total cost of a project. Arizona last year barred counties from requiring fire sprinklers in accessory dwelling units.

Indiana this year barred state and local governments from requiring arc fault circuit interrupters, or AFCIs, in certain residential buildings and emergency responder communication systems in some larger structures. AFCIs prevent electrical fires by detecting arcing in damaged or loose wiring before it builds heat inside a wall.

The Indiana bill’s lead sponsor, Republican state Rep. Doug Miller, said the state needed to “put a stake in the ground” to meet its need of roughly 50,000 homes, according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle. The Indiana Builders Association said local rules accounted for 24% of the cost for a new home.

This year, Iowa changed parts of the state electrical code, including AFCI and GFCI requirements. Ground fault circuit interrupters, or GFCIs, are designed to protect people from electric shock by shutting off power when they detect a fault in the current. Supporters said these changes can help keep electrical costs low for builders and consumers.

Iowa Democratic state Rep. Jeff Cooling, who is also an electrician, said the late-session legislation takes away some kitchen GFCI requirements, removes AFCI requirements and allows cheaper ceiling boxes in places where future homeowners may install heavy fixtures or ceiling fans. He opposed the bill.

Cooling said lawmakers often talk about code changes as a way to shave costs from new housing. But as an electrician, he said many of those requirements were adopted for a reason and usually after high-profile injuries, fires or deaths prompted necessary review and updates.

“None of these codes change just to change them,” Cooling said. “They’ve changed because people have been seriously injured or killed.”

Cooling said fellow electricians he spoke with estimated the Iowa changes would save about $850 on an average new house. “That’s a rounding error,” he said.

And for Cooling, that amount of savings is too small to justify removing protections at the sake of human lives.

“It’s not the world that we want to live in where we try to balance safety and what turns out to be low-cost savings,” he said.

Waiting on new building codes

Building codes are usually updated every three years through a public process, while states and local governments retain authority to amend and enforce them.

A new law passed in Connecticut will stretch what is normally a three-year state building code update schedule into a six-year gap, pausing updates between 2024 and 2030 cycles. The state is expected to produce a report due by Jan. 1, 2029, that will evaluate the effects of a six-year cycle for building code revisions.

Housing industry groups say Connecticut is not alone in extending or pausing the time between adopting building code changes. Last year, California froze most residential code changes through June 2031. North Carolina moved its residential code to a six-year review cycle in 2023.

The Connecticut proposal drew opposition from code officials and the International Code Council. Building officials and code organizations have warned that slowing adoption of new codes can also delay updates meant to respond to new risks.

Aube, the urban planner, said that code changes are not a silver bullet in the affordability puzzle.

“There’s not one answer,” she said. “It’s like making a cake, right? There’s a whole bunch of different ingredients that go in.”

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.

For some teenagers across the country, the summer is the first opportunity to gain work experience for their nascent resume. 

In a handful of states, however, teens who find jobs will find fewer protections under child labor laws. Four states — Indiana, Nebraska, Washington and West Virginia — enacted laws this year that weaken child labor protections, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank. In all, 13 states had bills seeking to weaken those protections; some are still under consideration.

Another three states saw bills filed this year to increase child labor standards, with one state — Oregon — enacting a new law. Oregon now stipulates that state rules on the total hours a minor can work cannot be less restrictive than the federal Fair Labor Standards Act rules that were in effect on Jan. 1. 

Among the states easing child labor laws this year, Nebraska established a lower minimum wage for 14- and 15-year-olds.  West Virginia made changes that allow teens to work longer hours in youth apprenticeships and relaxed rules related to time working on hazardous work assignments. 

Under a new Indiana law, the state’s Department of Labor will no longer be required to maintain the employer database for youth employment or require employers to participate in the database, meaning employers are not required to report that they employ workers younger than 18. 

Washington state lawmakers made it easier for teens in approved work-based learning programs to work longer hours, doubling the daily limit from four hours a day for up to 20 hours a week, to eight hours a day for up to 48 hours a week for minors enrolled in those programs. West Virginia’s law also loosened guardrails for minors in youth apprenticeship programs and lowered the age for workers to sell alcohol in bars. 

The Economic Policy Institute’s review, published this month, found that legislation seeking to roll back child labor protections follows four trends: lowering minimum wages for teen workers; making changes to youth apprenticeships, eliminating youth permits and weakening safeguards for teen child care workers.

A few other rollbacks remain pending in Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Bills in Florida, Massachusetts and Missouri proposed lowering youth wages but did not pass.

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.