Bill Would Bar Feds From Denying Jobs Over Past Marijuana Use

September 19, 2026

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A new bill dropped in the House on September 17 that would put a stop to something that's tripped up plenty of otherwise-qualified applicants: getting flagged for past marijuana use during federal hiring or security clearance reviews. H.R. 10504, called the CURE Act, comes from an unlikely-sounding but increasingly common pairing -- Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, and Rep. Zach Nunn, an Iowa Republican. Their bill would bar federal agencies from holding someone's history with cannabis against them when deciding whether they're suitable for a government job or eligible for a security clearance.

The timing matters. Recreational or medical marijuana is legal in some form in the vast majority of states, yet federal hiring and clearance processes still operate on a separate track, one where a joint smoked in college or a med card from five years ago can quietly sink an application. Agencies have actually put out guidance saying this shouldn't happen -- but guidance isn't law, and plenty of applicants either get screened out anyway or simply never apply because they assume they're disqualified before they start. This isn't the first attempt at fixing that gap, either. A nearly identical version of this bill cleared a House committee back in 2023 with a lopsided bipartisan vote, only to stall out before it ever reached the floor. Whether this new attempt fares any better is the real question hanging over it.

What the CURE Act Actually Does

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The core of the CURE Act is narrower than its ambitions might suggest, but it's still a meaningful shift. The bill's text specifically bars federal agencies from using 'past use of marihuana by a covered person' as a factor in eligibility or suitability determinations -- whether that's a decision about hiring someone for a federal job or granting them a security clearance. What makes this different from the status quo isn't the concept itself; agencies already have guidance discouraging this kind of penalty. What's different is where the protection would live. Right now it sits in policy memos that any incoming administration or agency head could quietly rewrite. This bill would fold that protection into existing federal personnel security law, making it statutory rather than discretionary.

There's an important limit built into the language, though: it only protects past use. Anyone currently consuming cannabis, even in a state where it's fully legal, would still be exposed to federal drug-free workplace rules and could still face consequences for current use uncovered through drug testing or self-disclosure. This isn't a bill about reconciling federal and state marijuana law generally -- it's specifically about not punishing people forever for something they did before applying.

As of the Friday following its introduction, H.R. 10504 had been referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and had not yet received a hearing or a committee vote. That's a normal, unremarkable stage for a freshly introduced bill, but it's also the stage where similar legislation has died before.

A Retroactive Review Process Going Back to 2008

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One of the more consequential pieces of this bill isn't about future applicants at all -- it's about people who already got turned away. The CURE Act would require every federal agency to stand up a formal review process within one year of the bill becoming law, specifically to revisit past denials of security clearances or job opportunities where marijuana use played a role. And the lookback window is substantial: agencies would have to review denials going all the way back to January 1, 2008, meaning some applicants who were rejected nearly two decades ago could get a second look.

To make that process usable rather than theoretical, agencies would be required to maintain a public-facing website explaining exactly how someone requests a review and what the process involves. Once a person files that request, the agency would have 90 days to determine whether the original denial was based solely on past marijuana use. If it was, that opens the door -- not a guarantee, but a real opportunity -- for the person to be reconsidered for the position or clearance they were denied.

This retroactive piece is worth sitting with, because it acknowledges something the guidance-only approach never addressed: telling agencies to stop penalizing past use going forward does nothing for the person who was already rejected in 2015 or 2019 under the old standard. For someone who's spent years assuming a marijuana-related denial permanently closed the door on federal employment, this creates an actual, dated mechanism to ask for another shot.

Why This Bill Looks Familiar

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If the structure of this bill feels like something you've seen before, that's because you probably have. The CURE Act's text closely mirrors H.R. 5040, a version of the same legislation that the House Oversight and Accountability Committee actually approved back in September 2023, by a 30-14 vote -- a genuinely comfortable bipartisan margin for a cannabis-adjacent bill. That earlier version came from Raskin alongside Reps. Nancy Mace and Earl Blumenauer, drawing support from both sides of the aisle even in a Congress not known for cannabis consensus.

That bill didn't survive its committee process unchanged, though. Then-Chairman James Comer added an amendment that narrowed the scope significantly, stripping out language that would have protected current marijuana consumers and limiting the bill's protections to past use only -- essentially the same limitation baked into today's version. Even with that narrowing, and even after clearing committee with real bipartisan support, H.R. 5040 never got a floor vote. It simply expired at the end of the last Congress, one of many cannabis-related bills that made it partway through the process and then quietly died.

The idea didn't disappear, though. Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan introduced a Senate companion in July 2024 called the DOOBIE Act, aimed at solving essentially the same problem -- past marijuana use blocking otherwise qualified applicants -- for federal positions nationwide. Between the House committee's prior vote and a Senate version already in play, there's at least a paper trail suggesting this isn't a fringe idea, even if it hasn't yet produced an actual law.

The Gap Between Guidance and Practice

Here's the frustrating part for anyone who's actually navigated this system: the guidance this bill would codify already technically exists. Both the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have issued guidance stating that past marijuana use, on its own, shouldn't be disqualifying for federal employment or clearance eligibility. On paper, someone with a history of cannabis use in a legal state shouldn't be getting rejected over it.

In practice, that guidance doesn't seem to be closing the gap it was meant to close. Plenty of qualified candidates never even apply, operating under the reasonable assumption that any marijuana history is an automatic disqualifier -- because for a long time, functionally, it was. That kind of self-selection is hard to measure but easy to understand: federal hiring has a reputation for caution around drug use that guidance memos haven't fully undone, especially for jobs touching national security.

The bigger structural problem is scale. With recreational or medical marijuana legal across most states, the pool of otherwise-qualified applicants with some cannabis history has grown enormously, while federal hiring practices have been slower to catch up to that reality. Guidance can bend with each administration; a statute can't be quietly walked back the same way. That's the real argument for codifying this into law rather than leaving it as agency policy -- it converts something agencies could choose to ignore into something applicants can actually point to and enforce.

The CURE Act has a few things going for it that a lot of cannabis-related federal bills don't. Bipartisan sponsorship from Raskin and Nunn signals this isn't being pitched as a partisan cannabis-legalization play, and the fact that a near-identical version already won a 30-14 committee vote in 2023 suggests there's real appetite for this specific, narrow fix even among lawmakers who aren't interested in broader marijuana reform. That's a meaningfully different starting position than most cannabis bills get.

Still, appetite in committee hasn't translated to a floor vote before, and there's no guarantee it will this time. The bill's fate now rests with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the same type of committee gatekeeping that let the 2023 version die quietly at the end of the last Congress. Nothing about the current legislative calendar guarantees this bill avoids the same outcome.

For now, anyone currently working in or applying for federal positions, or holding a security clearance, should treat this as a bill to watch rather than a protection to rely on. Check current agency policy directly, and check the marijuana laws in your specific state, since none of this changes the fact that H.R. 10504 is proposed legislation, not enacted law. The guidance protecting past use already exists in some form -- but until something like this actually clears both chambers and gets signed, that protection remains exactly as fragile as the next administration's policy preferences.