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The big tax and budget reconciliation law, signed by President Trump on July 4, 2025, includes a provision sought by the Insights Association to empower the insights industry’s workforce with more flexible and affordable approaches to training.

June brought lots of sizzling policy developments for the insights industry -- some promising, others challenging. Thankfully, the Insights Association was right in the thick of it. Let’s look at some wins on privacy issues and political polling, a troubling GDPR case in Europe, lots of new guidance on privacy, AI, HR, and email laws, developments on indirect costs in federally-funded research, and more.

The Florida legislature turned its back on a bill opposed by the Insights Association that would have banned public colleges and universities from polling on political candidates.

Early in the second Trump Administration, the federal government instituted a uniform 15 percent cap on indirect cost rates in government-funded research (including insights work). A group of experts are developing new models for funding indirect costs, and the Insights Association seeks member feedback on it.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) withdrew a regulatory proposal that could have unfairly applied restrictions in the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) to the work of many insights professionals. It would have been a misguided legal end-run around Congress to create a federal privacy law.

Legislative and regulatory issues facing the insights industry are blooming all over, including: a new FTC commissioner; proposed reform of the federal government research process; U.S. House-passed legislation to empower insights professionals with more training, while also prohibiting state AI regulation; state sales taxes advancing for insights-related services; a proposed ban on polling by public universities; new compliance guidance for the federal ban on sensitive data transfers to certain...

Budget reconciliation legislation, which included a provision sought by the Insights Association to empower the insights industry’s workforce with more training, has passed the U.S. House of Representatives.

Noting that the U.S. government’s current approach “to survey, opinion and market research, unchanged since 2006, wastes taxpayer resources and hurts the private sector,” the leading nonprofit trade association for the insights industry called for the urgent modernization of federal research policy.

In addition to the Insights Association's extensive recent comments to the House Energy & Commerce Committee on crafting federal privacy legislation, the nonprofit association also joined a coalition letter supporting a set of broad policy principles to guide such a bill.

The insights industry faced more than just April showers, as the first full month of spring brought tempestuous issues, such as whether recent federal government action against DEI and sex/gender identity means we can no longer ask demographic questions, and determining the current impact of DOGE on the industry. We weighed in with Congress on consumer data privacy legislation, looked at a new privacy law change in Utah and the status of some AI legislation in California, urged more funding for ...