Gluesenkamp Perez’s Amendment Passes House Appropriations Committee to Investigate Overly Bright Headlights

Last week, Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s (WA-03) amendment to the FY26 Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill passed the House Appropriations Committee on a unanimous bipartisan basis.

The amendment urges the Secretary of Transportation to study the impacts of headlight brightness on the vision and safety of drivers, pedestrians, and other road users, as well in regard to different terrain, such as hills and curves.

In May, Rep. Gluesenkamp Perez also urged the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee to adopt a maximum headlight brightness standard in the upcoming surface transportation reauthorization bill that retains visibility for both drivers and oncoming vehicles.

Rep. Gluesenkamp Perez has been outspoken about this, recently discussing her proposal with KUOW and The Bulwark. 

Full text of the amendment can be found here.

Video of Rep. Gluesenkamp Perez’s remarks can be found here. The following are Rep. Gluesenkamp Perez’s full remarks:

“I don’t know how many of you drive and how often, but I will tell you there is a plague in this country of headlight brightness. It is shockingly bright. If you look back to halogen light bulbs, you’re reaching somewhere around 700 to 1,200 lumens. New LED technology, these sons of bitches get to like 12,000 lumens.

It is not a binary choice between walking around in the dark, and the fire of a thousand suns. And the standards on this have not been reformed since before I was born. This is the only place I would be considered maybe young, on the Hill. But it is a real problem.

A third of Americans have an astigmatism. This is a serious risk to safety, driving, to pedestrians, in particular, where you’re not able to see, your eyes can’t dilate quickly enough to respond to a challenge in the road, or to anything, if you’re on curves, if you’re on roads.

I am sure you have all seen this. And the thing is everybody thinks it’s just them. They just think it’s their problem. But this is actually a systemic thing that has failed to be addressed in a realistic, fulsome real world design, accounting for the hills and the terrains and the curves. Not a lab in a closet somewhere, but how it’s actually experienced by drivers.

I spoke at a Transportation Member Day hearing, and it was insane. It blew up online.

It is so encouraging to hear what I’ve heard from my community, be affirmed by so many of our constituents and Americans broadly that this is something that is a real lived experience of deterioration in life.

And I think that we’ve seen this increase in polarization. You’ve got eight percent on one side and eight percent on the other side … they just watch CNN or they watch Fox News a lot. This is an opportunity to demonstrate that politics is relevant and useful to the lived experience of ordinary Americans, that this is not just something for a PhD in naval gazing, but it’s a lived experience.

We are out there driving the same cars, the same experiences, we’re seeing the same things. This is something that until we are demonstrating that this body is living the same reality, that that we are hearing and responding. And I will also say this is not a partisan by any means.

Thank you, Mr. Alford, for clapping. I appreciate you. I’ll give you your $20 later.

But … I would not call this a pro-regulatory environment, nationally. And this is something where people are saying, do something, be useful, be responsive to our experience.

So, my amendment is asking them to give us more information on this, to create a more fulsome valuation.

There’s a known reality that some of the manufacturers of these aftermarkets that because the scale is graded in points of brightness and not overall brightness, some manufacturers have even gone so far as to create dimmer cells in some parts of the headlights, so that they can have an overall higher brightness. So, really looking at the overall lumens.

You know, there’s a lot of conflating issues here, how Kelvin, how blue the tone of the light is, the human eye perceives blue as brighter, but it can be amber, Kelvin, whatever it is. If it’s 12,000 lumens, it’s too much.

And so there’s been some work on adaptive beams. It’s still not reaching where we need to go. It’s not providing the safety. Cars are getting safer, but pedestrian deaths are going up. Automotive accident deaths are holding stable.

And this is something that I feel passionately about, and I appreciate your indulgence in listening to me. And I would sincerely appreciate and urge your support, for our body to demonstrate if we can’t fix the small things, if we can’t exercise the muscle memory of bipartisanship, he who is faithful in a small thing is faithful in a great thing also.

And so to pursue utility to ordinary Americans, to keep that muscle of bipartisanship alive and building things, I urge and humbly ask for your support in this.”