STATES 2.0 Act's Slow Crawl Through Congress

September 6, 2026

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Type "H.R. 8998 cannabis" into a search bar right now and you'll find plenty of confident-sounding posts treating it as the STATES 2.0 Act. It isn't. H.R. 8998 in the 118th Congress is the Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2025 -- a funding bill for national parks, EPA operations, and Indian Health Service accounts. It has nothing to do with marijuana policy. The bill people actually mean is H.R. 2934, introduced April 17, 2025 by Rep. David Joyce (R-OH), and it's been sitting in three House committees ever since with no vote scheduled. GovTrack, which tracks these things systematically, currently gives it a 0% chance of enactment.

That number sounds like a punchline, but it's worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. Zero percent doesn't mean the idea is bad -- the bill's substance (interstate commerce protection, 280E repeal, a comparatively modest federal tax structure) is close to a wish list for an industry that's been asking for exactly this for years. What zero percent measures is institutional momentum in this specific Congress, at this specific moment. That's a narrower claim, and it's one that can change. This piece isn't a bet on H.R. 2934 clearing committee before the 119th Congress ends. It's a case study in how federalist deregulation fights actually resolve -- using the decade-long fight over telecom deregulation in the 1990s as the closest historical template we have.

Correcting the Record: What H.R. 8998 Actually Is

Let's clear up the bill number first, because it matters for anyone trying to track this themselves. H.R. 8998, as introduced in the 118th Congress, is a Fiscal Year 2025 appropriations bill covering the Department of the Interior, the EPA, and related agencies -- the kind of must-pass spending legislation that funds park rangers and environmental enforcement. It passed the House in July 2024 and then stalled in the Senate, which is the ordinary fate of standalone appropriations bills whenever Congress is divided and leadership prefers to roll everything into an omnibus later. There's no cannabis provision in it, no committee overlap with drug policy, nothing.

The actual STATES 2.0 Act, in the current 119th Congress, is H.R. 2934. Rep. David Joyce of Ohio's 14th District introduced it on April 17, 2025, as a successor to earlier STATES Act versions that circulated in prior Congresses without ever reaching a floor vote. If you want to bookmark one number for future reference, this is it.

The confusion here isn't really anyone's fault -- it's a structural quirk of how Congress numbers bills. Every two-year Congress starts its bill numbering over from scratch. A bill introduced as H.R. 2934 in one Congress has no relationship to whatever H.R. 2934 was two years earlier, and a bill that dies without passing doesn't carry its number forward when reintroduced later. The original STATES Act, the SAFE Banking Act, and now STATES 2.0 have all cycled through different numbers across different Congresses, which makes them easy to mix up with unrelated legislation that happens to reuse a similar-looking number. If you're tracking cannabis legislation seriously, the sponsor's name and the introduction date are more reliable anchors than the bill number alone, precisely because the number resets on a two-year clock that has nothing to do with the underlying policy fight.

Where H.R. 2934 Stands Right Now

Cosponsor support for H.R. 2934 grew steadily after its April 2025 introduction, climbing from a single sponsor to nine cosponsors by mid-2026, with notable additions like Obernolte and Carter joining in September 2025 and August 2026, respectively.

As of the most recent tracking, H.R. 2934 sits exactly where most ambitious cannabis bills have sat before it: referred, but not moving. It was assigned simultaneously to three House committees -- Energy and Commerce, Judiciary, and Transportation and Infrastructure -- which reflects how genuinely cross-cutting the bill is. It touches drug scheduling (Judiciary's turf), interstate commerce and consumer protection (Energy and Commerce), and transportation of goods across state lines (Transportation and Infrastructure). That breadth is a structural problem as much as a substantive one: getting a bill through one committee is hard enough, and here all three would need to act, or at least waive jurisdiction, before it could reach the floor.

Nearly a year after introduction, no committee vote has been scheduled in any of the three. Cosponsor growth tells a similar story of slow accumulation rather than building momentum. GovTrack's April 2026 snapshot counted 7 cosponsors -- 5 Republicans and 2 Democrats -- a number that has since ticked up to 9 with Rep. Carter joining as the third Democratic cosponsor, alongside Dina Titus (D-NV) and Val Hoyle (D-OR). Before that addition, the previous cosponsor to sign on was Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-CA) back on September 19, 2025. That's nearly eleven months between new names attaching themselves to the bill -- a pace that would take years to build the kind of broad, visible coalition that tends to precede a committee markup.

GovTrack's 0% enactment estimate should be read as exactly what it is: a probabilistic snapshot based on where things stand today, not a permanent verdict on the idea. Bills with low modeled odds do sometimes move when circumstances shift -- a change in committee leadership, a high-profile hearing, an election that reshuffles incentives. But right now, by every available marker -- committee inaction, glacial cosponsor growth, no Senate companion -- the institutional signals point toward stasis, not progress.

What the Bill Would Actually Do

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Strip away the procedural gridlock and the bill itself is a fairly comprehensive attempt to reconcile federal law with the reality that 40-plus states already run functioning cannabis markets. The core mechanism amends the federal Controlled Substances Act so that its marijuana prohibitions would generally not apply to activity that complies with state or qualifying tribal law. That's the same conceptual approach earlier STATES Act versions took -- not full federal legalization, but a carve-out that defers to whatever a state has already decided to permit.

Two provisions matter most for how the industry actually operates. First, the bill would protect interstate transportation of marijuana between legal jurisdictions -- meaning states sitting along a transport route generally couldn't block a shipment just passing through, though they'd retain the ability to enforce certain public health and safety restrictions. Second, and more consequentially, it would authorize actual interstate commerce between legal state markets. Right now a cultivator in Oregon cannot legally sell product into California or Nevada, even though all three states have mature adult-use markets, because federal prohibition treats every state market as its own sealed container. H.R. 2934 would open that container -- letting cross-border trade happen the way it does with almost every other agricultural or manufactured product in the country.

On the financial side, the bill would remove cannabis businesses from Section 280E of the tax code, the provision that currently bars them from deducting ordinary business expenses -- rent, payroll, marketing -- the way any other business can. That single change has been the industry's loudest ask for years, since 280E effectively taxes cannabis companies on gross revenue rather than net profit. Layered on top, the bill would establish a federal regulatory structure with a comparatively low tax rate, a deliberate contrast to state cannabis tax regimes that currently run anywhere from 15% to 37% depending on the jurisdiction and tax method. Whether Congress would actually hold that federal rate low once revenue projections are on the table is a separate question, but the framework as written is clearly designed to undercut, not stack on top of, existing state tax burdens.

The 1990s Telecom Precedent: Why Narrow, Bipartisan Bills Still Die

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The closest real-world template for what's happening with H.R. 2934 isn't another cannabis bill -- it's the fight over telecommunications deregulation that culminated in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That law took more than a decade to arrive, with roots going back to the 1982 consent decree that broke up AT&T. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, various deregulation bills got introduced in Congress and consistently stalled, parceled out across committees with overlapping jurisdiction -- Commerce, Judiciary, and others -- each of which had its own incentive to slow-walk the legislation or extract concessions before letting it move. That's structurally identical to what's happening to H.R. 2934 right now, sitting across Energy and Commerce, Judiciary, and Transportation and Infrastructure simultaneously.

What actually broke the telecom logjam wasn't a single sweeping federal bill finally finding the right coalition. It was a slower, state-by-state process: individual states, starting with places like Nebraska and California in the early 1990s, began deregulating their own local telecom markets ahead of Washington. By the time the 1996 Act passed, Congress wasn't taking a leap into the unknown -- it was ratifying a pattern that a critical mass of states had already tested and validated. Federal action followed state action; it didn't lead it.

Cannabis policy is tracing a similar arc. Forty-plus states with medical or adult-use programs already function as the state-level deregulation phase that, in the telecom analogy, preceded the federal fix by roughly a decade. If that pattern holds, H.R. 2934 or something like it eventually clears Congress not because lawmakers get persuaded by an abstract policy argument, but because enough state markets have quietly proven the model works.

The honest counter-case matters here too. Telecom deregulation had a powerful tailwind cannabis currently lacks: well-capitalized incumbent carriers -- the regional Bell operating companies, long-distance giants like AT&T and MCI -- pushing hard and spending heavily for a unified national framework because fragmented state rules were actively costing them money. Cannabis has nothing equivalent yet. Multi-state operators have some interest in interstate commerce, but there's no single dominant industry lobby with telecom-scale capital pushing Congress with that kind of unified urgency. That absence is a real reason this fight could take longer than telecom's did, not shorter.

The Rescheduling Wildcard

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Layered on top of the legislative track is a separate administrative one, and the two are currently racing each other in ways that could make H.R. 2934 either more or less relevant depending on which finishes first. On December 18, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14370, directing federal agencies to expedite the process of moving cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act. As of April 2026, that rescheduling still hadn't been finalized, despite the executive order's explicit push -- prompting Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) to publicly press the DEA and HHS for an explanation of the delay.

It's worth being precise about what rescheduling would and wouldn't do, because it gets conflated with legalization constantly. Moving cannabis to Schedule III would not legalize it federally, and it would not create anything resembling the interstate commerce protections at the center of H.R. 2934. It's a narrower administrative fix, and its practical effects are concentrated in two areas: it would ease the 280E tax burden (since 280E applies specifically to Schedule I and II substances), and it would loosen some research restrictions that have long hampered clinical study of cannabis in the U.S.

Here's the part worth flagging as a genuinely speculative but reasoned read: if rescheduling lands first, it could quietly reduce the political urgency behind H.R. 2934. One of the bill's marquee financial arguments -- 280E relief -- would already be partly resolved through executive action, leaving interstate commerce as the bill's main remaining unaddressed problem. That's a narrower, less broadly compelling pitch than the current package, and narrower pitches attract less coalition energy in Congress, not more.

This is a case where an executive-branch action and a legislative bill are running on parallel tracks that overlap in their effects without being coordinated with each other. Whichever process finishes first will reshape the political case for the other -- and right now, rescheduling looks closer to the finish line, even with its own delays, than a three-committee bill with a 0% enactment estimate and no Senate companion.

What Would Actually Move This Bill

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None of this means H.R. 2934 is dead in any permanent sense -- it means it's following a pattern that has a real precedent in recent cannabis legislative history. The SAFE Banking Act, which would let cannabis businesses access ordinary banking services, passed the House seven separate times across multiple Congresses before repeatedly stalling in the Senate. Each failed attempt got reintroduced with a new bill number and incremental cosponsor growth, and that repetition wasn't a sign the idea was fatally flawed -- it was simply what building a coalition around a still-contentious federalism question looks like in practice, echoing the telecom fight's decade-plus of failed attempts before 1996.

If you want a genuine early-warning signal rather than noise, watch for a committee vote in any one of the three assigned committees -- Energy and Commerce is the one to watch first, since it has previously held hearings on cannabis banking issues and has some institutional familiarity with the subject matter. A markup vote, even a party-line one, would be the clearest sign that momentum has shifted from theoretical to real.

Cosponsor growth matters too, but the composition matters more than the raw count. Nine cosponsors is still a small number for a bill this consequential, but the more telling detail is that three of them are now Democrats -- Titus, Hoyle, and Carter -- alongside five Republicans. Bipartisan growth beyond that trio would matter more than simply adding more Republican names, because it signals the bill escaping the perception of being a single-party priority, which is often the precondition for leadership actually scheduling floor time.

A Senate companion bill, or a public endorsement from a member of Senate Judiciary or Senate Banking, would be a stronger signal than anything the House alone can produce, since the House has passed cannabis-adjacent bills before only to watch them die in the Senate. Absent that, the conservative and probably correct read is this: with a GovTrack 0% enactment estimate and no committee vote after nearly a year, the more likely near-term outcome is that this Congress ends without action, and H.R. 2934's substance gets reintroduced in the 120th Congress under a new bill number -- following exactly the SAFE Banking pattern of repeated attempts before eventual passage, if it ever comes.

The realistic one-to-three-year forecast here is incremental, not dramatic, and it splits into two plausible branches. Either rescheduling to Schedule III lands first through the executive branch process already underway, which would partially defuse the tax-relief argument driving support for H.R. 2934 -- or the bill quietly dies this Congress without a committee vote and gets reintroduced in the 120th with a fresh number, repeating the exact pattern SAFE Banking went through across seven House passages before stalling out. Both outcomes are consistent with everything currently on the record; neither requires optimism or pessimism beyond what the data supports.

The telecom precedent points toward a further conclusion worth sitting with: whenever a federal cannabis framework eventually arrives, it will probably look less like a bold new architecture and more like ratification of what 40-plus states have already built through years of their own trial and error. That's what happened in 1996 -- Congress didn't invent telecom deregulation, it caught up to Nebraska and California. Businesses operating in cannabis right now would be better served planning around state-by-state compliance realities than waiting for Washington to hand them a unified national framework on any particular timeline.

If you're tracking this bill going forward, watch committee votes and Senate companion activity, not cosponsor counts. Cosponsor totals feel like momentum but often aren't -- they can accumulate for a year while a bill sits frozen in three committees, exactly as H.R. 2934 has. A markup vote in Energy and Commerce, or a Senator willing to introduce a companion bill, would tell you far more about this bill's real trajectory than any headline number ever will.