Flying has gotten hellish. Consumers might finally get compensated.

Under a new rule from the Biden administration, passengers could soon get relief for one of the most frequently cited travel grievances.

The rule, which was announced in late April, would require airlines to provide automatic refunds for flight delays, an issue that’s been a major source of consumer frustration in recent years. That’s a big change from existing policies, which give airlines significant leeway in doling out these refunds and require travelers to push for them themselves.

This proposal is just the latest consumer protection policy from the Biden administration and part of the White House’s broader efforts to burnish these credentials ahead of the 2024 election this fall. While the White House has had legislative success, including the passage of bills that lower prescription drug prices and make substantial investments in infrastructure, communicating those wins can be tough because many of these proposals will take years to implement and be felt.

The airline refund rule, which will go into effect in October, offers an immediate example of how the administration is trying to address a commonly expressed grievance. It also comes as negative sentiment has grown toward the airline industry in the wake of a shocking Boeing plane incident in January and subsequent scrutiny of industry-wide quality control issues. All told, delays and cancellations have cost airlines $8.3 billion and consumers $16.7 billion on an annual basis.

Here’s what you need to know about how the rule works and why it’s happening in the first place.

How the rule works

The new rule, to be implemented by the Department of Transportation (DOT), requires airlines to provide refunds for both flight cancellations and “significant changes.” For the first time, the agency spells out what these changes entail. They include:

• If a domestic flight is delayed more than three hours
• If an international flight is delayed more than six hours
• If the location of the departure or arrival airport changes
• If more connections are added to a flight
• If passengers are downgraded to a different class or service than the one they paid for

These criteria set a common standard for all airlines, making the basis for such refunds clear for both travelers and companies.

The new rule also makes these refunds automatic. That means that consumers don’t have to file a claim with the airline, streamlining the process.

The policy requires refunds to be provided within seven business days to consumers who use a credit card, and within 20 calendar days to those who use other forms of payment. Travelers will only be eligible if they turn down an alternative flight option or other compensation, like a travel voucher. That means if a passenger still took a flight after it was delayed for four hours, for example, they would not be eligible for the refund.

The new rule also guarantees refunds of other fees in case wifi doesn’t work or if checked baggage does not arrive within 12 hours of a domestic flight landing, or within 15 to 30 hours of an international flight landing.

Automating refunds is an important part of this policy because it puts the onus of figuring out penalties on the airlines and not the consumer. One issue that consumer advocate Christopher Elliott previously highlighted in the Washington Post, for example, was that customers in Europe would have to wait months for refunds they were seeking because airlines would take their time processing claims. The way the White House rule is written attempts to prevent companies from dragging their feet and to make them take on the logistical burdens of this process.

A bipartisan group of Congress members, however, are trying to undercut this provision of the rule. In a new bill that reauthorizes funding for the Federal Aviation Administration, lawmakers have included language that would require consumers to file a claim before they could receive a refund, Skift reports. “You shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to get your money back,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said in a statement in response to this measure. Warren and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have also filed an amendment to the FAA bill in an attempt to preserve the White House’s rule.

Biden is going in on consumer protection policies

The proposed rule is one of several consumer protection policies the White House has advanced in the last year.

It follows an FDA proposal that enabled hearing aids to be sold over the counter, likely reducing their cost, as well as a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) rule that reduces late fees for credit card payments. DOT also has another rulemaking in process that would eliminate additional fees for families trying to sit together on planes, the Federal Trade Commission is working on a rule to ban the use of hidden fees, and the CFPB is targeting bank overdraft fees as well.

Biden touted aspects of this push in his State of the Union address earlier this year in a bid to highlight his commitment to consumer protections.

The flight refund rule is intended to combat traveler discontent with the airline industry and the time and financial losses people face when they have to change their plans or reschedule travel. In a challenging election year, the choice to focus on such concerns allows the White House to point to key policies it’s delivered on and that people can feel directly in their daily lives.

It’s time to take back the Israel-Palestine debate from the radicals on both sides.

You may have heard of Shai Davidai, the Israeli professor at Columbia University who has launched a crusade against the school’s pro-Palestinian protestors.

He’s rocketed to fame by calling students terrorists, comparing himself to Jewish victims of Nazi Germany, and demanding the National Guard forcibly break up the student encampments. After the NYPD stormed Columbia’s campus on Tuesday night, arresting hundreds of students, he retweeted a message blaming the events on “a circus of narcissists, egged on by irresponsible faculty.” (Indeed.)

Davidai, like many of the loud pro-Israel voices in the national debate, is casting blanket aspersions on students who are protesting for good reasons. Well over 30,000 Palestinians are dead, many of whom are children; the devastation is so complete that a fully accurate death toll is now impossible. There is no good moral or strategic justification for Israel’s scorched-earth approach, which currently risks strengthening the terrorist group Hamas’s strategic position in the long term. Given that billions of American dollars are underwriting this atrocity, it’s easy to see why college campuses are in uproar.

But while the majority of students are genuinely motivated by justifiable outrage, a smaller faction have gone to a much darker place: going so far as endorsing Hamas’s murder of Israelis and calling for the violent destruction of Israel. All too often, they are tolerated by — or even members of — protest leadership.

Students for Justice in Palestine, the biggest national force behind the college protests, has described Hamas’s mass slaughter on October 7 as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” Khymani James, one of the leaders of the Columbia protests, publicly fantasized about murdering “Zionists.” University of Pennsylvania students chanted in support of Hamas’s military wing (“al-Qassam, make us proud, take another soldier down”). An organizer at UC-Berkeley distributed pamphlets explaining, in his words, how the Hamas attack “was an act of decolonization.”

The reciprocal extremism on college campuses, egged on by irresponsible university administrators who have heightened tensions by calling in the cops, is a window into a reality everyone knows: The American conversation about Israel-Palestine is broken.

Anyone who even touches the issue knows it’s toxic. The conversation is dominated by extremists who aggressively police the slightest misstep and punish internal dissent, a longstanding dynamic supercharged in recent years by social media. Recently, a prominent person in American politics privately told me that they see engagement on the topic as a no-win proposition. About half of all young American Jewish adults have stopped talking to someone they know over the conflict.

There are deep reasons why America’s Israel-Palestine discourse is so dysfunctional. They range from the pro-Israel movement’s embrace of Israeli extremists to the pro-Palestinian movement’s radical-chic culture to the uninspiring alternative on offer in official Washington. Put together, they create an environment where the loudest and most influential voices on each side are all too often the most aggressive and uncompromising ones.

In such an environment, the most reasonable people on each side — the ones that recognize that neither Israelis or Palestinians are going anywhere, and that peace can only be found through negotiated compromise — are sidelined. They are getting very little help from some alleged supporters of a two-state solution in Washington, where an insipid and out-of-touch approach does its own work to discredit the center.

Understanding these dynamics can help us grasp the dueling narratives around the campus protests. But more importantly, it can help us comprehend why the space for creating pro-peace coalitions seems to have shrunk — and what can be done to rebuild it.

Inside the pro-Israel movement’s radicalization

In the United States, the Israel-Palestine debate has gone through a long process of polarization and radicalization that has only gotten worse in recent years.

I know the dynamics on the pro-Israel side firsthand: When I was in college in the late 2000s, I was the president of my university’s pro-Israel campus group. I abandoned the post shortly after I got into a public argument with one of my own members after he endorsed West Bank settlement, an enterprise that I always thought was both morally wrong and politically suicidal.

As Israel’s government moved more and more to the right, increasingly captured by the anti-Palestinian settler movement, the pro-Israel movement moved with them — leaving no place for people like me. Today, I spend much of my professional life criticizing Israel from the anti-occupation left.

There are deep reasons why the pro-Israel movement is the way that it is. When I used to attend closed-door events for student activists held by AIPAC, the leading American pro-Israel lobby, they would tell us that they do not see second-guessing the Israeli government as part of the job description. Israel’s leaders determined what was in the country’s best interests; AIPAC and its activists worked merely to support that agenda on Capitol Hill.

Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

This “we don’t judge” policy, rooted in an uncompromising version of Zionism that grants little weight to Palestinian rights, has turned AIPAC and its allies into lobbyists for colonialism. In this, they have enthusiastically linked up with outright right-wing extremists like Pastor John Hagee, the leader of Christians United for Israel. The pro-Israel movement, once comfortable with a two-state solution when Israel’s leadership supported it, is now doing everything in its power to back a government bent on destroying it.

What was once called “liberal Zionism” — the view, held by a majority of American Jews, that Israel has a right to exist but no right to occupy Palestinian land — no longer has a place in the organized pro-Israel movement. AIPAC and other mainstream pro-Israel groups treat the smaller liberal Zionist organizations, like J Street and Americans for Peace Now, as mortal enemies.

The pro-Israel movement’s current job is mainstreaming Israeli extremism. And it has long been willing to threaten people’s careers and livelihoods — through tools like a public blacklist of pro-Palestinian scholars and students — in order to accomplish that end.

When “pro-Palestine” becomes “anti-peace”

The pro-Palestinian movement in the United States is far weaker than its pro-Israel twin. There is no Palestinian AIPAC capable of leading $100 million campaigns to unseat members of Congress. But as Americans’ sympathy with Palestinians continues to grow, the movement is poised to wield greater influence down the line — making its own radicalization process a subject of real concern.

In his book The Movement and the Middle East, historian Michael Fischbach argues that the 1960s-era radical left in the United States fractured over Israel-Palestine, and the events of that period determined “where progressive Americans stand on these issues today.”

During the Cold War, the most hardline factions took an uncompromising pro-Palestine stance, seeing armed Arab struggle against Israel as part of the global fight against Western imperialism. More moderate groups, by contrast, supported Israel in existential conflicts like the 1967 Six-Day War. With extreme left factions playing a disproportionate role in shaping pro-Palestine activism, a significant chunk of the movement took on a similarly radical cast.

In this, they were aided by the censorious efforts of the pro-Israel extremists, who worked to turn “Palestine” into a dirty word in mainstream American political discourse. This meant that, for many years, young people passionate about the Palestinian cause were drawn toward far-left factions who called for Israel’s destruction, lionized Palestinian violence, and saw the two-state solution as a sellout compromise.

Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images

“It became a far-left issue because it was so stigmatized,” says Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “You had to be on the far left … in order to fit being a champion of the Palestinians into your professional career path.”

In the 2000s, Ibish helped found the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP), a DC-based group that aimed to promote the Palestinian cause from a pro-peace standpoint. He recalls unremitting hostility from both the AIPAC-style pro-Israel groups and the existing far-left pro-Palestinian infrastructure. ATFP was chronically short of money, maxing out at three full-time policy staffers. It ultimately shuttered its doors in 2016.

“We failed,” Ibish says, “because no one supported us.”

Today, the Palestinian cause is far more mainstream than it once was — especially among young people and liberals. This is primarily the result of Israel’s rightward political drift: As Israel continues West Bank colonization and pulverizing Gaza, the injustice of the status quo becomes increasingly hard to deny.

Yet far-left maximalists still wield disproportionate influence in the pro-Palestine activist and intellectual communities. This is why prominent voices on the issue today — like the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, “dirtbag left” podcasters, the president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and academics like Judith Butler — have been able to praise or sanitize Hamas’s actions on October 7 without meaningful pushback on their own side.

Breaking the radicalization doom loop

The most radical voices on both sides are not representative of broader public opinion. Polling shows that Americans favor a two-state solution by a roughly 20-point margin. About 30 percent support Israeli annexation of the West Bank; only 5 percent believe that Hamas’s action on October 7 was acceptable. A sizable majority of American Jews are uncomfortable with actions of the Israeli state; only a small minority of American Muslims endorse terrorism against Israelis.

The radicalism you see in the news or on social media reflects neither the mass public nor the views of Americans from the most affected groups. Instead, it reflects the views of the extremely engaged. Their every utterance or action is magnified by their extreme allies and enemies alike, making it seem as if the worst and most marginal voices stand in for everyone else.

Extreme activists polarizing public debates is not an uncommon phenomenon: Look, for example, at the way anti-abortion activists or climate change radicals push well beyond what the average person in their coalition supports. Once people get locked into mutually hostile camps, the rank-and-file becomes more tolerant of any kind of extremism directed at their opponents — and less tolerant of any internal voices calling for compromise and mutual dialogue. The more radical one side appears, the more the other radicalizes in response.

What’s happening on Israel-Palestine is an especially bitter version of this standard political polarization doom loop.

So what can be done? The obvious answer is to make space for pro-peace voices. And that starts, counterintuitively, by creating room for more challenges to what appears like a moderate Washington consensus — but in reality is a debate heavily tilted toward Israel.

Both major American political parties have long been staunchly pro-Israel. The Republican version of this is rabid, increasingly aligned with Netanyahu and his far-right government. The Democratic version is pallid, mouthing empty support for two states and bromides about shared liberal values even as Israel starves Palestinian children. The handful of dissenters, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) or Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), have been relentlessly attacked as anti-Israel or even antisemitic (though there’s more room for them today than there has been in the past).

Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

When the establishment seems out of touch with reality, extremism tends to flourish. Republicans may be fine with that, but Democrats clearly are not. If they wish to defang campus radicals on their left flank, they need to create more space in the system for taking legitimate concerns with Israel’s behavior seriously. Cease unconditional support for the war in Gaza and start thinking more creatively about how to pressure Israel into taking up Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s recently reiterated offer to negotiate.

As horribly polarized as the Israel-Palestine debate seems, there actually is space for productive coalition-building that can contribute toward the cause of peace. Let’s not let the extremist voices in the discourse distract us from that fact.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission chair today made a final plea to Congress, asking for money to continue a broadband-affordability program that gave out its last round of $30 discounts to people with low incomes in April. The Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) has lowered monthly Internet bills for people who qualify for benefits, but Congress allowed funding to run out. People may receive up to $14 in May if their ISP opted into offering a partial discount during the program's final month. After that there will be no financial help for the 23 million households enrolled in the program. "Additional funding from Congress is the only near-term solution for keeping the ACP going," FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel wrote in a letter to members of Congress today. "If additional funding is not promptly appropriated, the one in six households nationwide that rely on this program will face rising bills and increasing disconnection. In fact, according to our survey of ACP beneficiaries, 77 percent of participating households report that losing this benefit would disrupt their service by making them change their plan or lead to them dropping Internet service entirely." The ACP started with $14.2 billion allocated by Congress in late 2021. The $30 monthly ACP benefit replaced the previous $50 monthly subsidy from the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ArsTechnica: Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That's when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe. Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Razer will have to fork over $1.1 million in refunds to customers who purchased its RGB-clad Zephyr face mask, according to a proposed settlement announced by the Federal Trade Commission on Monday. The company claimed the face mask used N95-grade filters, but the FTC alleges Razer never submitted them for testing and only “stopped the false advertising following negative press coverage and consumer outrage at the deceptive claims.”

Razer first released its Zephyr face mask in 2021 as a nifty, cyberpunk-esque alternative to traditional face masks worn during the covid-19 pandemic. Although Razer initially marketed the $100 mask as having N95-grade filters, it scrubbed any mention of the grade after YouTuber Naomi Wu tore down the mask and found that it wasn’t N95 certified after all. N95 masks are supposed to filter out at least 95 percent of airborne particles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Razer also planned on launching a $150 Zephyr Pro with a voice amplification feature, but that never panned out. At the time, Razer addressed claims about its Zephyr masks, saying in a post on X that “the Razer Zephyr and Zephyr Pro are not medical devices, respirators, surgical masks, or personal protective equipment (PPE) and are not meant to be used in medical or clinical settings.”

The FTC alleges that Razer made misleading statements about the mask on social media and product pages and also claims Razer never had it tested by the Food and Drug Administration or the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. The Verge reached out to Razer with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.

“These businesses falsely claimed, in the midst of a global pandemic, that their face mask was the equivalent of an N95 certified respirator,” Samuel Levine, the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. “The FTC will continue to hold accountable businesses that use false and unsubstantiated claims to target consumers who are making decisions about their health and safety.”

The FTC’s proposed settlement also requires Razer to pay a civil penalty of $100,000 and bans the company from making “COVID-related health misrepresentations” and other “unsubstantiated health claims.” So, if you purchased one of these masks, you might be getting your money back.

Dangerous, polluting SUVs and pickups took over America. Lawmakers are partly to blame.

Cars, you might have noticed, have grown enormous.

Low-slung station wagons are all but extinct on American roads, and even sedans have become an endangered species. (Ford, producer of the iconic Model T a century ago, no longer sells any sedans in its home market.) Bulky SUVs and pickup trucks — which have themselves steadily added pounds and inches — now comprise more than four out of every five new cars sold in the US, up from just over half in 2013, even as national household size steadily declines.

The expanding size of automobiles — a phenomenon I call car bloat — has deepened a slew of national problems. Take road safety: Unlike peer nations, the US has endured a steep rise in traffic deaths, with fatalities among pedestrians and cyclists, who are at elevated risk in a crash with a huge car, recently hitting 40-year highs. Vehicle occupants face danger as well. A 2019 study concluded that compared to a smaller vehicle, an SUV or a pickup colliding with a smaller car was 28 percent and 159 percent, respectively, more likely to kill that car’s driver.

Car bloat also threatens the planet. Because heavier vehicles require more energy to move, they tend to gulp rather than sip the gasoline or electricity that powers them, increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Extra weight also accelerates the erosion of roadways and tires, straining highway maintenance budgets and releasing microplastics that damage ecosystems.

Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

What lies behind this shift? Some Americans prefer bigger cars, especially when gas prices are low, for their ample storage space, ability to see over other vehicles on the road, and perceived safety benefits (more on that later). But shifting consumer demands tell only part of the story.

For half a century, a litany of federal policies has favored large SUVs and trucks, pushing automakers and American buyers toward larger models. Instead of counteracting car bloat through regulation, policymakers have subtly encouraged it. That has been a boon for car companies, but a disaster for everyone else.

Here are some of the most egregious examples.

Why we let bigger cars pollute more

After the 1970s OPEC oil embargo triggered a spike in gas prices, the federal government adopted an array of policies intended to reduce energy demand.

One of Congress’s most consequential moves was creating the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which require that the average fuel economy (miles per gallon, or MPG) of a carmaker’s vehicles remain below a set threshold.

Pressed by auto lobbyists, Congress made a fateful decision when it established CAFE. Instead of setting a single fuel economy standard that applies to all cars, CAFE has two of them: one for passenger cars, such as sedans and station wagons, and a separate, more lenient standard for “light trucks,” including pickups and SUVs. In 1982, for instance, the CAFE standard for passenger cars was 24 mpg and only 17.5 mpg for light trucks.

That dual structure didn’t initially seem like a big deal, because in the 1970s SUVs and trucks together accounted for less than a quarter of new cars sold. But as gas prices fell in the 1980s, the “light truck loophole” encouraged automakers to shift away from sedans and churn out more pickups and SUVs (which were also more profitable).

Car ads of the 1980s and 1990s frequently featured owners of SUVs and trucks taking family trips or going out with friends, activities that could also be done in a sedan or station wagon. The messaging seemed to resonate: By 2002, light trucks comprised more than half of new car sales.

In the early 2000s, the federal government made these distortions even worse.

During the George W. Bush administration, CAFE was revised to further loosen rules for the biggest cars by tying a car model’s efficiency standard to its physical footprint (which is basically the shadow cast by the vehicle when the sun is directly above it). President Obama then incorporated similar footprint rules into new greenhouse gas emissions standards that are overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Dan Becker, who led the Sierra Club’s global warming program from 1989 to 2007, told me that he and others warned federal lawmakers that adopting footprint-based standards was a mistake. “People like me were saying, ‘give carmakers another loophole and they’ll use it,’” he said. “But we lost.”

Those concerns proved justified. The average vehicle footprint expanded 6 percent between 2008 and 2023, a “historic high,” according to an EPA report, which also found that some carmakers, such as General Motors, actually had lower average fuel economy and higher average carbon emissions in 2022 than in 2017. To its credit, the EPA recently announced revisions to its vehicle GHG rules that would narrow (but not close) the gaps between standards for large and small cars.

But the shift toward electric vehicles may further entrench car bloat. The EPA’s rules assume that all EVs, regardless of their design, generate no emissions — a questionable assumption, because EVs create emissions indirectly through the production and transmission of power that flows into their batteries. A huge or inefficient battery requires more electricity, which can lead to significant pollution (especially in regions where fossil fuels dominate the energy mix).

The EPA’s policy of treating all EVs equally makes a monstrously wasteful vehicle like the Hummer EV seem cleaner than it is, encouraging carmakers to manufacture more of them.

To counteract EV bloat, Peter Huether, a senior research associate at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, would like to see the EPA revise its GHG rules to consider emissions from power generation and transmission: “If these standards look at upstream emissions, it could have a downstream effect on shape and size of EVs.”

Blocking smaller cars from abroad

What does a 60-year-old trade dispute have to do with car bloat? More than you might imagine.

In the early 1960s, Europe raised the ire of American officials by slapping a 50 percent tariff on chicken exported from the United States. In retaliation, the US enacted a 25 percent tax on pickup trucks imported from abroad. The dispute is long forgotten, but the “Chicken Tax” lives on.

Although the tariff was initially aimed at Germany’s immense auto industry (Volkswagen in particular), it also applies to pickups imported from newer automaking powers such as Japan and South Korea, where carmakers are often adept at building vehicles much smaller than those available to Americans.

Toyota’s Hilux Double Cab pickup, for instance, weighs several hundred pounds less than a 2024 Ford F-150 Tremor or Lariat and is about half a foot shorter. But Americans who might want it are out of luck. Toyota does not sell the Hilux in the US (but does in countries like India and Britain); the 25 percent tariff would make it prohibitively expensive.

“The Chicken Tax has prevented competitive Asian or European truck makers from entering the US market,” said Jason Torchinsky, a co-founder of the Autopian, a media outlet focused on the auto industry. “American manufacturers have really never had to compete.” John Krafcik, who previously led Hyundai, has called the Chicken Tax “one of the most important determinants of how the [auto] industry looks today and how it operates today in the US.”

The tariff has been condemned by everyone from the Libertarian Cato Institute, the center-right American Enterprise Institute, and the left-leaning Tax Policy Center. “Tariffs in general hurt consumers, and the Chicken Tax is no exception,” wrote Robert McClelland of the Tax Policy Center.

There are other protectionist rules blocking smaller vehicles from abroad: Carmakers from China, an emerging automaking behemoth, face a 25 percent tariff enacted by Donald Trump. As a result, Americans cannot buy small Chinese EV sedans like the BYD Seagull that cost around $10,000, barely a fifth the price of an average American car.

And those hoping to import a kei truck, a miniature pickup common in Japan, must navigate a labyrinth of federal and state rules. (Even Afghanistan seems ahead of the US in minitruck offerings, as the Wichita Eagle’s Dion Lefler noted in a tongue-in-cheek 2023 column: “In the land of the free, why can’t we have mini-pickup trucks like the Taliban?”)

These policies have established a regulatory moat protecting US automakers whose profits disproportionately come from pricey, hulking SUVs and trucks.

The Hummer Tax Loophole

In 1984, Congress stopped allowing small business owners to take a tax deduction for the purchase price of cars used for work. But the bill included a giant loophole: To protect those who need a heavy-duty vehicle (think farmers or construction workers), Congress made an exception, known as Section 179, for cars that weigh over 6,000 pounds when fully loaded with passengers and cargo. Today such behemoths are eligible for a tax deduction of up to $30,500, while business owners who opt for a smaller car can claim nothing at all.

Few car models were heavy enough to qualify for the tax break 40 years ago, but that is no longer the case: A Hummer 1, for instance, weighs about 10,300 pounds (leading Section 179 to be dubbed the “Hummer Tax Loophole”). Other huge cars, such as a Chevrolet Suburban or an F-250 Ford Super Duty truck can qualify, too.

“Few folks at EPA know about Section 179,” said Becker, the former Sierra Club executive. “But every auto dealer does.” Some car dealerships even offer handy Section 179 guides on their websites. The tax advantage of buying a behemoth may be powerful enough to tilt the vehicle purchase decisions of individuals like real estate agents, who use their vehicles for both professional and personal use. And as cars electrify, the added tonnage from batteries will allow more models to qualify for favorable tax treatment.

If Section 179 sounds crazy, consider another federal loophole that has endured for decades. In 1978, Congress established the “Gas Guzzler Tax,” requiring automakers to pay between $1,000 and $7,700 for every car produced that gets less than 22.5 miles per gallon. But the tax only applies to passenger vehicles like sedans and station wagons. SUVs and pickups, which often have much worse gas mileage, are exempt. That omission makes no sense from a policy perspective, but it is good news for carmakers producing inefficient behemoths.

Freezing the gas tax

Every time a car owner fills her gas tank, a portion of the bill goes into the federal Highway Trust Fund, a central source of funding for roads and mass transit. That tax rate is set at $0.184 per gallon, a level that has been frozen since 1993, when Bill Clinton was less than a year into his presidency. Congressional proposals to increase the gas tax to close a yawning highway budget gap, or at least tie it to inflation, have gone nowhere.

Over the last 31 years, consumer prices have risen 113 percent, making the real value of the gas tax less than half what it was in 1993. That decline has reduced the cost of powering a huge SUV or truck with abysmal gas mileage, like the 6,270-lb 2024 Cadillac Escalade that gets around 16 mpg.

A 2018 OECD study found that the US had the lowest average gas tax (including both federal and state taxes) among rich nations, which averaged $2.24 per gallon — four times the typical US rate. “Why are European cars so small?” said McClelland, of the Tax Policy Center. “One reason has got to be the much higher gasoline tax.”

Federal policy ignores crash risk for anyone outside a car

A vehicle’s design affects not just the safety of its occupants, but also people walking, biking, or inside other cars. Although seemingly obvious, this basic truth has eluded federal regulators for decades.

Car safety rules are laid out in the encyclopedic Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS), which touches on everything from power windows to seat belts. But the FMVSS revolves around protecting a vehicle’s occupants; nothing within its 562 pages limits a car’s physical design to protect someone who might come into contact with it in a collision. That omission invites an arms race of vehicle size — precisely what the US is experiencing.

Nor does the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) consider pedestrians, cyclists, or other car occupants when calculating its safety ratings from crash tests. Unlike safety ratings in Europe and elsewhere, the American crash ratings program also ignores the danger that vehicle designs pose to those walking and biking.

NHTSA’s myopic focus on car occupants is a boon for the heaviest and tallest cars, which pose disproportionate risk to those outside of them. Weightier vehicles exert more force in a crash, and they require additional time to come to a halt when a driver slams on the brakes. A 2023 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) found that vehicles with tall, flat front ends (common on big pickups and SUVs) are significantly more likely to kill pedestrians in crashes. An earlier IIHS study found that large cars also make it harder to see pedestrians at intersections.

Mindy Schauer/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images

With pedestrian and cyclist deaths now soaring, NHTSA last year took its first, tentative step toward protecting so-called vulnerable road users by proposing that its vehicle safety ratings be revised to include an evaluation of automatic pedestrian braking technology, which can force a vehicle to halt before striking someone on foot. But even if adopted, it would not affect NCAP’s 5-star safety rating, the hallmark of the program.

And NHTSA’s focus on automatic pedestrian braking, an imperfect tech fix, ignores car bloat, a root cause of America’s traffic safety crisis. Earlier this year, a paper co-authored by former NHTSA executive Missy Cummings gave an ominous assessment of automatic braking systems, concluding that they did not work consistently. By contrast, the potential safety benefits of constraining vehicles’ weight and height have been well established.

Why can’t we fix things?

All of these policies have distorted the US car market, leading the 278 million vehicles plying American roads to become ever bigger, more dangerous, and more destructive. So why have they remained on the books after the growing societal costs of car bloat became impossible to miss?

To find an answer, consider who benefits from oversized vehicles. American carmakers like Ford and GM (which are headquartered in Michigan, a crucial swing state) rely on juicy margins from big SUVs and pickups, which are more expensive and profitable than smaller models. They enjoy protection from foreign competition through tariffs like the Chicken Tax, as well as favorable policies like CAFE’s light-truck loophole.

The regulatory status quo suits domestic automakers just fine — and they act as a roadblock to even modest attempts to change it. In 2022, for example, the largest auto industry association lobbied District of Columbia council members against a proposal to charge owners of the most egregiously oversized cars $500 per year, seven times more than a light sedan (the District adopted the policy anyway).

Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

As American sales of big SUVs and trucks have surged, their owners are likely to resist policy moves they see as penalizing them. Many are likely to be unaware of the federal loopholes and policy oversights that have distorted their vehicle choices.

The negative externalities of supersized cars — in emissions, crash deaths, and the erosion of tires and pavement — are what economists call a market failure, since their costs are borne by society writ large, not the people who buy big pickups and SUVs. Left unaddressed, those societal costs will grow as more people replace their modest-sized cars with big SUVs or trucks. After all, everyone else seems to be doing it — why not do the same, if only for self-preservation?

Regulation can end such a cycle toward enormity. Countries including France and Norway have enacted weight-based taxes to counteract car bloat’s collective costs and avoid giving huge vehicles implicit subsidies. But American policymakers have done the exact opposite, and they rarely even acknowledge the problem. Asked explicitly about ways that the Department of Transportation could address car bloat, Secretary Pete Buttigieg ducked, calling merely for “further research.”

With the feds refusing to lead, it has fallen on state and local leaders to try and address car bloat themselves. Colorado and California, for instance, have proposed weight-based vehicle registration fees, following the District of Columbia’s lead. But such moves are an imperfect solution to a national problem (vehicles can, after all, be driven across state lines). A true policy fix will require action from Congress, NHTSA, and the EPA.

It need not begin with new regulations or taxes. Federal leaders could do a world of good if they simply unwind the ill-advised policies already on the books.

Kendra Levine contributed research assistance.