Legislative Corner: September 2026

Child Sexual Exploitation: Bipartisan Senate Commerce Committee leadership hope to take a package of bills to the floor for a vote in September that would force online companies to protect minors. The GFWC supported Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA, S. 1748) would require platforms to mitigate harm to children, increase protections on minors’ data, and give the option to opt out of personalized algorithms. The measure includes a critical “duty of care” provision that would legally compel tech platforms to design their products with minors’ safety in mind. The House-passed version passed in June omits the “duty of care.”

The Youth AI Privacy Act, CHATBOT Act, and the Children’s Artificial Intelligence Toy Safety Act of 2026 also got the Commerce Committee’s approval to move forward. The Youth AI Privacy Act would help ensure that minors can benefit from AI chatbots without sacrificing their privacy or being shaped by systems that retain too much information about them. The bill would require safety features such as providing clear and repeated warnings to kids that the chatbot is not human and also prohibit advertising to minors on chatbots. The CHATBOT Act would give parents greater control over their kids’ interactions with chatbots. Parents have claimed that platforms feed content to children that addict, manipulate, exploit, and abuse children and teens. The Children’s Artificial Intelligence Toy Safety Act directs the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to conduct a study on the risks of injury to children from AI-enabled toys and the social, emotional, and educational outcomes for children using those toys. The bill requires the Federal Trade Commission and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to create a joint action plan with recommendations for legislation, regulations, guidelines, standards, and education relating to the sale and marketing of AI-enabled toys.

FY 2027 Federal Appropriations: No one wants a federal government shutdown before the midterm elections. House of Representatives leadership announced that it will vote on the Senate-passed Continuing Resolution the week of August 31 to keep federal government services available until December 11. The bipartisan Senate package includes a temporary ban on the White House proposal to put political appointees in charge of approving billions of dollars in federal grant awards each year. The measure also includes additional funds for operations of national parks, disaster relief funding for FEMA, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition

Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). The Continuing Resolution does include funding for Small Business loans, the Indian Health Service, the Department of Justice, wildfire suppression, and extends a number of expiring authorities and programs. GFWC has focused its advocacy on funding for domestic and sexual violence programs, public libraries, and international immunization programs.

Nutrition Programs: While the existing reauthorization for farm and nutrition programs expires September 30, another extension is most likely. The Senate farm bill would postpone by a year the implementation of a requirement for states to share the cost of providing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, but it also creates a harsher penalty for states with the highest error payment rates. It would require those states to pay for 20 percent for SNAP benefits – instead of the original 15 percent maximum a state would have to contribute – starting in FY 2031. There are other major disagreements between the House and Senate bills, so a compromise is not expected by September 30.