The Bill Behind the Bureaucratic Name
On June 8, 2026, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 6028, the "Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act," by voice vote after roughly forty minutes of floor debate. No committee hearings were held. No expert testimony was solicited. The bill, sponsored by four Republican members, would strip the Library of Congress of its supervisory authority over the U.S. Copyright Office, make the Register of Copyrights a Senate-confirmed presidential appointee serving a ten-year term, and transfer DMCA Section 1201 rulemaking authority from the Librarian of Congress directly to the Register. The bill now awaits Senate action.
The Case for Reform — Fairly Stated
Reform proponents have a legitimate argument worth taking seriously. The Copyright Office is no longer a quiet cataloguing agency. It recommends exemptions from federal anti-circumvention law that affect repair technicians, cybersecurity researchers, educators, and technology companies. An official exercising that kind of quasi-regulatory authority, appointed by an unelected librarian without Senate vetting, occupies a genuine democratic accountability gap. Making the Register a presidential nominee confirmed by the Senate — with a protected ten-year term designed to insulate against short-term political pressure — could be read as a step toward more transparent, formally accountable governance. That is a real argument. It deserved a proper public hearing. It did not receive one.
Why the Process Disqualifies the Reform
H.R. 6028 received forty minutes of floor debate instead of the deliberation its scope demands. A coalition including the Re:Create Coalition, the Library Copyright Alliance, and the Center for Democracy & Technology urged Congress to slow down, calling for full committee consideration, public comment, and expert testimony before restructuring an institution that touches the rights of creators, researchers, and technology users. The absence of that process is not a procedural formality. It is the difference between genuine institutional reform and institutional capture dressed in reform language.
The Context Courts Already Established
The political backdrop strips H.R. 6028 of any credible claim to principled government modernization.
In early May 2025, the Trump administration fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. The following day — May 10, 2025 — Register Shira Perlmutter was removed, one day after the Copyright Office published a detailed report questioning whether AI training on copyrighted works qualifies as fair use. That conclusion was inconvenient to major AI industry interests with White House proximity. Perlmutter sued, arguing the firing was unlawful. On September 10, 2025, a divided D.C. Circuit panel reinstated her, ruling that her role is housed in the legislative branch and her "primary role is to advise Congress" — placing it outside the president's removal authority. The Supreme Court declined to act immediately, deferring a final ruling in November 2025 while she remained in place.
H.R. 6028 responds to that judicial loss with a legislative workaround: if the courts say the Copyright Office is legislative and therefore insulated from executive removal, change the statute so the president controls appointment from the start.
The D.C. Circuit's September 2025 ruling was explicit: Perlmutter's role was legislative, not executive. H.R. 6028 legislates away the structural basis for that reasoning — without the deliberation that would allow anyone to scrutinize what is being traded away.
The DMCA Section 1201 Exposure
The stakes are most concrete in DMCA Section 1201 rulemaking. Every three years, the Copyright Office runs a proceeding in which petitioners — repair advocates, security researchers, educators, disability organizations — must seek temporary exemptions from the law's anti-circumvention provisions. The ninth triennial cycle, finalised by the Librarian of Congress on October 28, 2024, processed petitions that included right-to-repair exemptions for vehicles, medical devices, and agricultural equipment — exemptions that directly enable farmers to repair their own tractors, mechanics to run diagnostics, and patients to access data from their own devices. The tenth proceeding is now underway, with exemptions set to run through October 2030.
Under H.R. 6028, that proceeding's outcome would be determined by an official selected by and accountable to the president. The Library of Congress's institutional counter-weight — a body whose mission centres on preserving and expanding access to knowledge — would be removed. An administration that fired the previous Register for publishing analysis it disliked has now engineered a mechanism to prevent that from happening again.
What Pro-Innovation Policy Actually Requires
Innovation benefits from copyright governance that works. The DMCA's triennial exemption process has been, imperfectly but meaningfully, the primary mechanism by which technology users can challenge overreaching content locks — enabling security research, enabling right-to-repair, enabling educational fair use. That process requires a regulator capable of absorbing political pressure without bending to it.
A Senate-confirmed appointee with a ten-year term is not, in principle, incapable of that independence. But conducting a reform initiated specifically to overrule an inconvenient court ruling — and rushing it through without hearings — is a structural contradiction that institutional good faith cannot resolve. The very speed of passage signals that the reform cannot survive scrutiny.
The Senate should demand open hearings. If the Copyright Office genuinely needs modernisation, that case can be made in public, with experts, across party lines. If it can only survive a voice vote on a quiet Monday afternoon, that tells you precisely what this reform is actually for.