House Appropriations Panel Keeps Cannabis Drug Testing Intact

The House Appropriations Committee has moved to insulate federal workplace drug testing from cannabis rescheduling, directing the Department of Transportation to continue testing safety-sensitive transportation workers for marijuana regardless of how the Trump administration’s scheduling changes ultimately proceed.

The directive appears in the committee report attached to the fiscal year 2027 transportation spending bill, which the full committee approved on June 4, 2026, in a 34-to-27 vote. An amendment adopted by voice vote during the markup added language stating that federal and state changes to cannabis’s legal status “should not be construed to alter existing Federal drug testing requirements applicable to Federal employees and individuals serving in safety-sensitive positions.”

The report directs DOT to continue requiring marijuana testing — alongside cocaine, opioids, amphetamines, and phencyclidine — for workers in safety-sensitive positions regulated by five agencies: the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the Federal Railroad Administration, the Federal Transit Administration, and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. The testing mandate holds, the report states, “regardless of any future changes to the legal status or scheduling of such substances under Federal law.”

Who it affects and why it matters

The workers covered are the full sweep of DOT-regulated transportation personnel: truck and commercial bus drivers, airline pilots, train engineers, subway operators, ship captains, pipeline emergency responders, and aircraft maintenance workers, among others. Under DOT’s workplace drug and alcohol testing regulations, these employees are already subject to marijuana testing during pre-employment screenings, random selection pools, and post-accident evaluations. A confirmed positive for marijuana metabolites removes a worker from safety-sensitive duty — state medical marijuana authorization is not a valid exception.

DOT had already taken that position publicly before the committee acted. After the Trump administration’s December 2025 executive order directing the Justice Department to complete the cannabis rescheduling process, the department’s Office of Drug and Alcohol Policy and Compliance issued a notice making clear that its drug testing regulations would remain unchanged until rescheduling was fully complete. The agency extended that position to the April 28, 2026 DEA final order that moved certain FDA-approved and state-licensed medical marijuana products to Schedule III, stating the order did not amend the testing framework.

For cannabis consumers in safety-sensitive positions, those prior DOT statements had already answered the practical question — their testing obligations did not change when the rescheduling took effect. The committee’s directive now puts Congress on record with the same answer. Report language doesn’t carry the force of a statute, but it gives appropriators a documented marker: any future administrative move to ease testing requirements would run directly against explicit congressional intent.

The friction underlying this debate is real. Cannabis metabolites can remain detectable in urine for weeks after use, well after any physiological impairment has passed. Legalization advocates have consistently argued that the current testing standard conflates past use with present impairment and can cost workers their livelihoods over off-duty consumption. The committee did not engage with that argument; it reinforced the current standard.

Impaired driving tech and an ad ban

The same committee report directs the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to assess what commercially available or potentially feasible technology currently exists for law enforcement to detect cannabis presence at the roadside. NHTSA must brief appropriators within 180 days of the bill’s enactment. The committee also said it supports development of an objective standard capable of measuring recent cannabis use — an acknowledgment that roadside technology reliable enough to establish recent consumption, rather than mere presence, does not yet exist at scale. A separate House bill advancing similar impairment standards cleared another committee last month.

The spending bill itself — as distinct from the advisory report — contains a provision barring NHTSA from using any funds in the legislation to “encourage illegal drug or alcohol use” in its public service announcement campaigns. The provision appears aimed at anti-impaired-driving campaigns in recent years that leaned into cannabis culture aesthetics as a messaging strategy, drawing criticism from opponents of legalization.

The full bill still needs to pass the House floor and clear the Senate before becoming law. But the committee has established on paper that it views DOT’s drug testing framework as freestanding — a set of safety rules with their own amendment process, separate from what happens to cannabis on the federal scheduling ladder. Whether any future DOT rulemaking revisits that assumption remains an open question.