On or around June 17, 2026, the US House of Representatives passed H.R. 6028, the Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act, by voice vote. Packaged as a technical tidy-up of legislative-branch governance, the bill does three consequential things at once: it strips the Library of Congress of its supervisory authority over the US Copyright Office, makes the Register of Copyrights a presidential appointee confirmed by the Senate (capped at a renewable 10-year term), and consolidates rulemaking authority — including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's Section 1201 anti-circumvention exemptions — inside the Office itself (Congress.gov, H.R. 6028 text). The bill now heads to the Senate.
The strongest case for the bill
The reform is not frivolous, and it deserves to be taken on its merits. For decades, copyright lawyers have complained that the Register of Copyrights — the official who registers hundreds of thousands of claims a year, advises Congress, and runs a body of complex administrative rulemaking — answers to the Librarian of Congress, a position with no requirement of copyright expertise. Making the Register a Senate-confirmed officer arguably aligns accountability with authority: the person wielding quasi-regulatory power over a multi-trillion-dollar slice of the economy would face confirmation scrutiny and a defined term. The bill also creates an Office of Inspector General inside the Copyright Office, a genuine accountability gain. And the appointment confusion is not hypothetical — the structure has already been litigated.
The structural problem it ignores
That litigation is exactly why the timing should give the Senate pause. In May 2025 the Trump administration fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and moved to remove Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, attempting to install Justice Department officials in both roles. On September 10, 2025, the D.C. Circuit reinstated Perlmutter, with Judge Florence Pan writing that removing 'the Legislative Branch's chief advisor on copyright matters, based on the advice that she provided to Congress, is akin to the President trying to fire a federal judge's law clerk' (Roll Call). The Supreme Court deferred a decision on the dispute in November 2025 (SCOTUSblog).
H.R. 6028 resolves that separation-of-powers fight by simply giving the executive what the courts had blocked: direct presidential appointment and removal power over the Register. A structural ambiguity that the judiciary treated as a feature of the Office's independence becomes, by statute, a presidential lever.
Why Section 1201 makes this more than a personnel question
The quiet detail with the largest practical footprint is Section 1201. Under current law, the DMCA's prohibition on circumventing technological protection measures is balanced by a triennial 'fail-safe': every three years the Librarian of Congress, acting on the Register's recommendation, adopts temporary exemptions so that lawful uses — repair, accessibility, security research, text-and-data-mining for scholarship — aren't criminalized by anti-piracy locks (U.S. Copyright Office, 2024 Section 1201 proceeding). The most recent cycle, finalized in October 2024, granted exemptions for everything from diagnosing commercial food-preparation equipment to expanding research access to copyrighted corpora.
That split — Register recommends, Librarian decides — is a modest internal check. H.R. 6028 collapses it. Rulemaking authority moves entirely to a Register who now serves at presidential pleasure. So the official deciding whether you may legally jailbreak a device you own, repair your tractor, or run security research on connected hardware would be appointed by, and removable by, the President — and subject, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation warns, to the lobbying pressure of rights-holder industries that have every incentive to narrow exemptions (EFF).
Speech and innovation stakes
This is where the proportionality argument bites. Section 1201 exemptions are not bureaucratic trivia; they are the pressure-release valve that keeps the DMCA from chilling fair use, the right to repair, accessibility for disabled readers, and independent security testing. The triennial process is already criticized as cumbersome and tilted toward incumbents. Concentrating its outcome in a single politically-appointed officer — without the existing two-step buffer — raises the risk that lawful innovation and speech become hostage to whichever industry coalition holds the White House's ear that term. EFF cautioned that changes to the Office carry consequences for 'the speech rights, educational opportunities, and creative freedoms of all Americans.'
Process is the tell
Good institutional design can survive scrutiny; this bill avoided it. A restructuring that touches the First Amendment contours of digital fair use, the independence of a legislative-branch officer, and the balance of power between Congress and the President passed the House by voice vote — no recorded vote, no hearings, no markup of the constitutional questions a federal appeals court had flagged months earlier.
We support a more accountable, expert-led Copyright Office, and an Inspector General is overdue. But accountability and capture are different things. The Senate should slow down, hold hearings, and — at minimum — decouple Section 1201 rulemaking from direct presidential control, preserving an independent check on the rules that govern whether Americans may lawfully tinker with, repair, study, and build on the technology they own. A bill worth doing is worth debating.