After more than three years of advocacy, countless emails and phone calls, repeated trips to Washington, D.C., and a lot of persistence, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act (H.R. 979) Tuesday evening.
This is a big win for radio!
The bipartisan legislation passed the House by voice vote under suspension of the rules and now moves to the U.S. Senate. For Colorado’s broadcasters, this has been a three-year fight. It began in 2023 when several automakers announced plans to remove AM radio from new vehicles. What initially looked like an AM radio problem quickly became something much bigger.
AM remains one of the most resilient ways to communicate with the public when things go wrong, radio keeps broadcasting. For rural communities in particular, AM provides tremendous geographic reach without requiring a cellular signal, Wi-Fi connection or credit card. It delivers local news, weather, information, sports and, when an emergency happens, potentially lifesaving information. That’s not just a legacy technology. That’s a lifeline.
Representatives Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) and Frank Pallone (D-NJ) reintroduced the legislation as H.R. 979 in 2025. It eventually attracted 317 House cosponsors, cleared the House Energy & Commerce Committee 50–1 and continued moving through Congress while broadcasters across the country kept up the pressure. Tuesday night, that work finally paid off in the House and Colorado played an important role in getting us here.
The Colorado Broadcasters Association is incredibly grateful to Representatives Jeff Crank, Jason Crow, Gabe Evans, Jeff Hurd, Joe Neguse and Brittany Pettersen for cosponsoring H.R. 979 and standing with Colorado broadcasters throughout this effort. We also thank Congresswoman Diana DeGette for supporting H.R. 979 when it came before the House Energy & Commerce Committee.
But I especially want to thank Colorado’s broadcasters and their listeners. Over the past three years, you answered our calls to action. Stations asked their listeners to contact Congress, broadcasters called and emailed their representatives and talked about this issue on the air. CBA Board members traveled to Washington and supported this effort year after year. We sat down with members of Colorado’s congressional delegation and their staffs again and again to explain why keeping AM radio in vehicles matters to the communities we serve.
You showed up. Tuesday’s House passage demonstrates what can happen when broadcasters speak with a unified voice and refuse to give up. For three years, we’ve fought to keep AM radio in the automobile dashboard. But I’ve said from the beginning that this fight is about more than AM. It’s about preserving free radio in vehicles. It’s about maintaining a direct connection between local broadcasters and the communities we serve. And it’s about making sure that when everything else fails, there is still a trusted local voice coming through the car radio.
But we’re not done.
H.R. 979 now heads to the Senate, where companion legislation S. 315 has already cleared the Senate Commerce Committee and has more than 60 bipartisan cosponsors. Now we need the Senate to finish the job and send this legislation to the President.
