U.S. Legislative Issues

President Obama on Monday, April 29 nominated Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx as his next transportation secretary. In remarks at the White House, Obama credited Foxx with helping turn around Charlotte’s battered economy after the economic crisis in 2008, which had a dramatic impact on the city’s financial services industry. If confirmed by the Senate — where there appear to be no signs of significant opposition — Foxx will replace Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.


On Monday, April 22, 2013, NAFA joined with others in the Commodity Markets Oversight Coalition (CMOC) in filing an amicus curiae brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia in support of a Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) rule that would limit speculative trading in commodities, including energy futures. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act required the CFTC to quickly adopt speculative position limits for all energy futures and swaps and report back to lawmakers on their impact after the limits had been imposed for one year. Accordingly, the CFTC approved a final rule on October 18, 2011 that would have imposed speculative position limits on futures and swaps for 28 listed commodities.

Last September, a District Court judge, responding to a legal challenge by Wall Street groups, vacated the rule citing an "ambiguous" Congressional mandate and the CFTC’s failure to determine if it should have made a finding of necessity before promulgating the final rule.

In its amicus brief, the CMOC supports the CFTC’s position that Congress mandated a rule setting speculative position limits, citing nearly a decade of Congressional investigations and dozens of hearings into the matter. During that time, lawmakers received expert testimony from CMOC members on the harm that excessive speculation was causing their industries and constituent businesses.


The U.S. Department of Transportation has released distraction guidelines that encourage automobile manufacturers to limit the distraction risk connected to electronic devices built into their vehicles, such as communications, entertainment and navigation devices. The guidelines include a recommendation by NAFA that the guidelines not apply to law enforcement, fire, and other emergency response vehicles.

Issued by the Department's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the voluntary guidelines establish specific recommended criteria for electronic devices installed in vehicles at the time they are manufactured that require drivers to take their hands off the wheel or eyes of the road to use them. The guidelines include recommendations to limit the time a driver must take his eyes off the road to perform any task to two seconds at a time and twelve seconds total. The guidelines also recommend disabling several operations unless the vehicle is stopped and in park, such as:

• Manual text entry for the purposes of text messaging and internet browsing
• Video-based entertainment and communications like video phoning or video conferencing
• Display of certain types of text, including text messages, web pages, social media content

NHTSA agreed with NAFA’s recommendation regarding law enforcement and emergency response vehicles and said, "In order to respond quickly to emergencies, law enforcement, fire, and medical response personnel may need to perform tasks that might normally be locked out under the NHTSA Guidelines. The agency believes that emergency responders’ effectiveness is unlikely to be jeopardized by allowing emergency response drivers to perform certain job-related tasks."


The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has released the report Second Report to Congress: Highlights of the Diesel Emissions Reduction Program. From 2008 to 2010, EPA awarded nearly $470 million to more than 350 grantees in 50 states and the District of Columbia to retrofit, replace, or repower more than 50,000 vehicles and equipment in a variety of industries. EPA estimates that these projects will reduce emissions by at least 203,900 tons of NOx (nitrogen oxide) and 12,500 tons of PM (particulate matter) over the lifetime of the affected engines. The Report to Congress is available at www.epa.gov/cleandiesel