A month of the congressional lame-duck session has already passed, and a bill that would require AM radio in the dashboard remains among the many pieces of legislation yet to be taken up. Several emergency management groups are stepping up the pressure to change that with the days on the legislative calendar numbered.
A coalition of groups from across the Southeast is calling on Congress to act, saying Hurricane Helene once again proved why AM radio is so critical.
“During and after the storm, roughly six million people in the southeastern United States lacked power, and many did not have cellphone or internet service. They still managed to receive access to life-saving information because the emergency managers on the ground made significant use of the government’s emergency alerting systems, which rely heavily on AM radio signals,” the group has written in a letter to Congressional leadership.
They point out that the September storm once again demonstrated that AM radio “almost always remains strong,” and it’s why “great sums of taxpayer dollars” have gone into supporting the Emergency Alert System with AM as a key part of its infrastructure. “During and immediately after Helene, the impacted population relied upon AM radio to navigate their families away from rising water, to receive updates on where to access supplies or shelter, to know which bridges and roads were out and which remained passable, and sometimes just to hear another human’s voice while stranded alone in the dark,” the emergency managers say.
The proposed AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act (H.R. 8449/S. 1669) has been passed out of committee in both the House and Senate. It has continued to grow support, with a filibuster-proof majority of 63 Senators co-sponsoring the bill. In the House, 268 members are co-sponsors.
If passed, the bill will require the Secretary of Transportation to issue a rule requiring access to AM broadcast stations in motor vehicles. If they don’t, carmakers could be fined. Before the effective date of the rule, manufacturers that do not include AM would be required to put a warning label on vehicles. Automakers would have at least two years to comply with the rule, although some manufacturers that produce fewer than 40,000 passenger cars for sale in the U.S. would have at least four years to meet the requirement.
“The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act will ensure that the public retains access to this vital public safety tool at all times,” emergency officials say in their letter to Capitol Hill calling for action before lawmakers adjourn. “Not acting on this bill will threaten the safety of Americans in future disasters,” they warn.
It is not just emergency managers from the Southeast that are keeping a spotlight on the effort. Current and previous leadership of New York’s police and fire departments have called on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to bring the bill to the floor for a vote. The Senate version (S. 1669) passed out of committee in July 2023 but Schumer has not yet scheduled the bill for a final vote, despite having the super-majority required to overcome any potential filibuster.
“As we reflect on the recent anniversaries of both 9/11 and Superstorm Sandy, we are reminded of just how important AM radio was to informing the citizenry during and in the days after these crises and how the public’s safety would be jeopardized in future events without access to AM signals,” the group told Schumer.
One worry among supporters is that if the bill fails to get over the finish line in the current session, it might find trouble when President-elect Trump is sworn in next month. Trump has formed tight ties with Tesla founder Elon Musk, whose company is among those that has removed AM from the dashboards of its electric vehicles. Tesla been among several automakers that have urged Congress to reject the bill, saying the mandate improperly puts the government in a position of favoring one industry over another. And they say interference between the batteries in electric vehicles and AM signals is the reason why they are taking AM radio receivers out of dashboards, and no amount of legislation will change the engineering of the situation.
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