House subcommittee splits on SECURE Data Act that preempts state privacy laws
House subcommittee splits on SECURE Data Act that preempts state privacy laws
https://statescoop.com/house-subcommittee-secure-data-act-preempts-state-privacy-laws-2026/
Publish Date: 2026-06-03 17:09:00
Source Domain: statescoop.com
Members of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee split along party lines during a hearing Wednesday to consider the SECURE Data Act, with Republicans touting the bill as a long‑overdue national privacy framework, and Democrats warning it would strip away a number of hard‑won state protections.
The partisan divisions, which echoed a number of prior debates about a federal data privacy standard, predictably saw Republicans on the Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade Subcommittee — particularly, the two authors of the bill, GOP Reps. John Joyce of Pennsylvania and Brett Guthrie of Kentucky — pushing the SECURE Data Act as a pro‑innovation and small business-friendly bill that incorporated the best of the over 20 state comprehensive privacy laws.
Meanwhile, Democrats and a civil-liberties advocates argued against the bill fiercely, stating that the standard the SECURE Data Act would set would be “weaker than the weakest state law,” and wipe out not only those over 20 state comprehensive privacy laws, but the stronger state protections in places like California’s Delete Act, Connecticut’s new law that was inspired by the Delete Act, the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, or BIPA, and Washington’s My Health, My Data Act.
‘Red states, blue states, and purple states’
The legislation aims to create a nationwide standard for protecting personal data, while barring states from enforcing any data privacy law that overlaps with the federal framework. It follows extensive work by the Energy and Commerce Data Privacy Working Group, which gathered more than 250 written submissions and consulted with at least 170 organizations over the past year to help design the bill.
“Reaching this consensus was only possible with strong collaboration between members of the working group, who are all original co‑sponsors of this legislation,” Joyce said in his opening remarks. “This legislation is built on the foundations laid…
