Amtrak Transparency and Accountability for Passengers and Taxpayers Act
Download PDFSponsored by
Rep. Nehls, Troy E. [R-TX-22]
ID: N000026
Bill's Journey to Becoming a Law
Track this bill's progress through the legislative process
Latest Action
Placed on the Union Calendar, Calendar No. 113.
June 6, 2025
Introduced
đź“Ť Current Status
Next: The bill will be reviewed by relevant committees who will debate, amend, and vote on it.
Committee Review
Floor Action
Passed House
Senate Review
Passed Congress
Presidential Action
Became Law
đź“š How does a bill become a law?
1. Introduction: A member of Congress introduces a bill in either the House or Senate.
2. Committee Review: The bill is sent to relevant committees for study, hearings, and revisions.
3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.
4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.
5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.
6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.
7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!
Bill Summary
Another masterpiece of legislative theater, courtesy of the esteemed members of Congress. Let's dissect this farce, shall we?
The "Amtrak Transparency and Accountability for Passengers and Taxpayers Act" (HR 188) is a bill that claims to promote transparency and accountability in Amtrak's operations. How quaint.
In reality, this bill is a textbook example of regulatory capture, where the interests of special groups are prioritized over those of the general public. The bill's sponsors, Mr. Nehls and Mr. Graves, must have been heavily lobbied by Amtrak's union representatives and contractors to craft such a masterpiece of obfuscation.
The new regulations created or modified in this bill are designed to provide Amtrak with an excuse to keep its meetings and decision-making processes opaque. The language is deliberately vague, allowing Amtrak to claim exemptions from transparency requirements for "contract negotiations," "collective bargaining agreements," and "confidential commercial information." How convenient.
Affected industries and sectors include the rail industry, labor unions, and contractors who do business with Amtrak. Compliance requirements are minimal, as Amtrak can simply claim that certain information is exempt from disclosure. The timelines for compliance are also conveniently vague, allowing Amtrak to drag its feet indefinitely.
Enforcement mechanisms and penalties? Ha! Don't make me laugh. This bill relies on the honor system, trusting that Amtrak will voluntarily comply with the new regulations. As if Amtrak's history of inefficiency and mismanagement inspires confidence in their ability to self-regulate.
The economic and operational impacts of this bill are negligible, except for one group: Amtrak's unionized employees and contractors. They'll be the ones benefiting from the lack of transparency and accountability, as they continue to negotiate sweetheart deals behind closed doors.
In conclusion, HR 188 is a classic case of regulatory capture, where special interests hijack the legislative process to serve their own agendas. It's a bill that claims to promote transparency but actually does the opposite. I'd give it an F- in terms of actual reform, but an A+ for creative obfuscation.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have better things to do than watch this farce unfold. Wake me up when someone introduces a real reform bill that doesn't make me want to vomit.
Related Topics
đź’° Campaign Finance Network
Rep. Nehls, Troy E. [R-TX-22]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
No PAC contributions found
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Cosponsors & Their Campaign Finance
This bill has 1 cosponsors. Below are their top campaign contributors.
Rep. Graves, Sam [R-MO-6]
ID: G000546
Top Contributors
10
Donor Network - Rep. Nehls, Troy E. [R-TX-22]
Hub layout: Politicians in center, donors arranged by type in rings around them.
Showing 24 nodes and 24 connections
Total contributions: $102,850
Top Donors - Rep. Nehls, Troy E. [R-TX-22]
Showing top 19 donors by contribution amount
Project 2025 Policy Matches
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.
Introduction
— 598 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise unemployment programs were defrauded of hundreds of billions of dollars, includ- ing by state-sponsored hacking groups. Not all state agencies are yet through their backlogs of appeals and fraud cases; the recovery of lost funds has been minimal; and fraud has now spilled into the traditional UI programs. The CARES Act era drastically altered the entire UI ecosystem: The federal–state partnership shifted toward federal programs and funding, and the social insurance purpose of the program was disconnected as benefits were extended, expanded to more typically uncovered populations, and made exponentially larger. l Congress should enact bipartisan commonsense UI program reforms, including statutory authority for the Labor Office of Inspector General (OIG) to access all state UI records for the purposes of investigation and requiring state agencies to crossmatch applicants with the National Directory of New Hires. l Congress should also develop a framework (through commission of a congressional report to serve as a blueprint) of technical standards on broader tech topics like usability, state agency cybersecurity postures, data taxonomy standardization, and/or identity verification standards. l Congress should provide DOL with more reasonable enforcement tools for the UI system. Currently, DOL can either send a strongly worded letter or revoke the entire Federal Unemployment Tax Act (FUTA)16 tax credit, which would place an immediate 6 percent to 7 percent tax on all covered employers. l DOL should review all actual or planned procurements against the $2 billion (under the American Rescue Plan Act)17 for UI fraud detection, accessibility, and equity investments. These funds do not have appropriations timelines and have very minimal statutory descriptions of the intended purpose. DOL should also review and propose changes to improve state monitoring programs including developing evidence-based frameworks for evaluating the technical readiness and security postures of the state agencies; strengthen its relationship with the OIG and Government Accountability Office (GAO), and support continued development of fraud prosecution with DOJ, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the financial services community; ensure administrative and IT funding is outcome-based; and gather and publish best practices from state officials, industry partners, and other vendors who deliver UI services. — 599 — Department of Labor and Related Agencies WORKER VOICE AND COLLECTIVE BARGAINING Non-Union Worker Voice and Representation. American workers lack a meaningful voice in today’s workplace. Between 50 percent and 60 percent of workers have less influence than they want on critical workplaces issues beyond pay and benefits. Even managers are twice as likely to say their employees have too little influence rather than too much. But America’s one-size-fits-all approach undermines worker representation. Federal labor law offers no alternatives to labor unions whose politicking and adversarial approach appeals to few, whereas most workers report that they prefer a more cooperative model run jointly with management that focuses solely on workplace issues. The next Administration should make new options available to workers and push Congress to pass labor reforms that create non-union “employee involvement organizations” as well as a mechanism for worker representation on corporate boards. l Congress should reintroduce and pass the Teamwork for Employees and Managers (TEAM) Act of 2022.18 The TEAM Act: 1. Reforms the National Labor Relations Act’s (NLRA) Section 8(a)(2) prohibition on formal worker–management cooperative organizations like works councils. 2. Creates an “Employee Involvement Organization” (EIO) to facilitate voluntary cooperation on critical issues like working conditions, benefits, and productivity. 3. Amends labor law to allow EIOs at large, publicly traded corporations to elect a non-voting, supervisory member of their company’s board of directors. Alternative View. While some conservatives lament that workers lack sufficient voice in today’s workplace, others interpret the rise in independent and flexible work opportunities, significant expansion in family-friendly policies like paid family leave, and the decline in private sector unionization as indicators of workers’ increasing competency and control. Another way to help expand workers’ freedom and voices in traditional workplaces is by allowing them to choose who represents them in negotiations with their employer. The Worker’s Choice Act19 would accom- plish this by ending exclusive representation so that unions in right-to-work states are no longer forced to represent workers who do not want to join them. Union Transparency. Private-sector unions must file detailed financial infor- mation with DOL—on matters including union spending, income, loans, assets, membership information, and employee salary—but unions composed entirely
Introduction
— 869 — 30 FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION Adam Candeub MISSION/OVERVIEW America’s antitrust laws are over a century old. In 1890, the U.S. Congress enacted the Sherman Act,1 the first federal prohibition on trusts and restraints of trade. The Clayton Act,2 adopted in 1914, builds upon the Sherman Act, outlawing certain practices, such as price fixing, while bringing other business combinations, such as mergers and acquisitions, under regulatory scrutiny. The Federal Trade Commission Act (FTCA),3 also adopted in 1914, gives the federal government legal tools to combat anticompetitive, unfair, and deceptive practices in the marketplace, empowering the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce provisions of the Sherman and Clayton Acts. The FTCA prohibits “unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” Sections 3, 7, and 8 of the Clayton Act empower the FTC to block unlawful tying contracts, unlawful corporate mergers and acquisitions, and inter- locking directorates. Under an amendment to the FTCA, the Robinson–Patman Act,4 the FTC has authority to prohibit practices involving discriminatory pricing and product promotion. While the FTC has enforcement or administrative respon- sibilities under more than 70 laws, the FTCA and the Clayton Act are the focus of its regulatory energy. FTC actions, therefore, turn on the antitrust principles and market principles it adopts. Modern approaches to antitrust stress that the objective of antitrust law is to assure a competitive economy—which in economic terms maximizes both allocative efficiency (optimal distribution of goods and services, taking into account consumer’s preferences, so that prices tend toward marginal cost) and productive — 870 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise efficiency (using the least amount of resources for optimal output)—and thereby maximizes consumer welfare.5 Recently, however, many in the conservative movement have taken a broader view of antitrust. They point out that the authors of our antitrust laws did not intend this purely economic understanding of competitive markets—and the normative assumptions that undergird it—to guide their legislation. First, these principles were only imperfectly worked out at the time the antitrust laws were passed. Second, contemporaneous statements concerning the Sherman and Clay- ton Acts demonstrate Congress’s concern about the political and economic power of the oil and railroad trusts of the first Gilded Age, and their influence on dem- ocratic institutions and civil society. Antitrust law can combat dominant firms’ baleful effects on democratic institutions such as free speech, the marketplace of ideas, shareholder control, and managerial accountability as well as collusive behavior with government. Republican Senator John Sherman explained to Congress in support of his eponymous legislation: If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.6 Similarly, identifying the institutional threats that market concentration can pose, the former Republican President and future Supreme Court Justice William Howard Taft wrote at the time, The federal antitrust law is one of the most important statutes ever passed in this country. It was a step taken by Congress to meet what the public had found to be a growing and intolerable evil in combinations between many who had capital employed in a branch of trade, industry, or transportation, to obtain control of it, regulate prices, and make unlimited profit. Taft saw in this economic threat broader implications for American society since “the building of great and powerful corporations which had, many of them, intervened in politics and through use of corrupt machines and bosses threatened us with a plutocracy.”7 Others in the conservative movement have maintained for numerous decades that an economic justification is the only coherent approach to the antitrust laws. Many view the first 90 years of U.S. antitrust policy as unprincipled in its approach, often resulting in policies that, by trying to protect smaller competitors, ended up
Introduction
— 869 — 30 FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION Adam Candeub MISSION/OVERVIEW America’s antitrust laws are over a century old. In 1890, the U.S. Congress enacted the Sherman Act,1 the first federal prohibition on trusts and restraints of trade. The Clayton Act,2 adopted in 1914, builds upon the Sherman Act, outlawing certain practices, such as price fixing, while bringing other business combinations, such as mergers and acquisitions, under regulatory scrutiny. The Federal Trade Commission Act (FTCA),3 also adopted in 1914, gives the federal government legal tools to combat anticompetitive, unfair, and deceptive practices in the marketplace, empowering the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce provisions of the Sherman and Clayton Acts. The FTCA prohibits “unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” Sections 3, 7, and 8 of the Clayton Act empower the FTC to block unlawful tying contracts, unlawful corporate mergers and acquisitions, and inter- locking directorates. Under an amendment to the FTCA, the Robinson–Patman Act,4 the FTC has authority to prohibit practices involving discriminatory pricing and product promotion. While the FTC has enforcement or administrative respon- sibilities under more than 70 laws, the FTCA and the Clayton Act are the focus of its regulatory energy. FTC actions, therefore, turn on the antitrust principles and market principles it adopts. Modern approaches to antitrust stress that the objective of antitrust law is to assure a competitive economy—which in economic terms maximizes both allocative efficiency (optimal distribution of goods and services, taking into account consumer’s preferences, so that prices tend toward marginal cost) and productive
Showing 3 of 5 policy matches
About These Correlations
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.