What Congress is left with now that the FCC acted. The FCC added foreign-produced humanoid and quadruped robots to its Covered List this week, effective July 28. Most of the commentary focuses rightfully on what the designation does to the robots but its also interesting to consider what it does to the robotics bills proposed in Congress, given that there are overlaps on policy. First (and obvious) observation: if you like a policy, you always want it codified into federal statute, not just have it reflected in agency action. The current admin can always changes its mind, or the next guy could have a different policy altogether and rescind what the agency did. Statutes are far harder to repeal or amend. If you like the natsec finding and the FCC action, then you want to see it and things like it get enacted through Congress. Okay with that out of the way, let's start with the GUARD Act. Its central mechanism was to direct the national security agencies to review adversary-produced humanoids and quadrupeds and to place the ones presenting unacceptable risk on the Covered List, with automatic addition for anything not reviewed within a year. Big overlap with the FCC's actoin but the bill sets out procedure. It would supply a review standard, a timeline, and a default rule for a designation authority the agency has already shown it will exercise without any of those things. It also catalogues what can't hit the Covered List. Like the FCC action, it operates prospectively through equipment authorization, which means it constrains new models seeking clearance to enter the U.S. market. Hardware already authorized and already deployed sits outside it. It also operates at the level of the finished device, which leaves the component question unaddressed. A different bill addresses capital flowing to robotics. The Cassidy and Coons bill from last November would amend the Defense Production Act to treat any investment by a covered-nation entity in a U.S. business that designs, tests, develops, or manufactures humanoid robots as a covered transaction, expressly without regard to whether the investment results in control, and with a mandatory declaration attached. An interesting potential attachment to the FY2027 NDAA. We now have at least four different descriptions of the thing being regulated. The FCC has made a designation. The NDAA provision covers military procurement of certain humanoids. Cassidy and Coons proposed a four-part conjunctive test requiring, among other things, that the machine understand natural language commands. GUARD abandoned that approach in favor of counting articulated limbs. These do not describe the same population of machines, and the divergence would undoubtedly raise a number of difficult compliance questoins if all of these definitions became effective. Wheeled mobile manipulators with two arms fall inside some of these definitions and outside others. When agency action front-runs the statute, the statute often arrives to ratify what the agency did and to fill the gaps the agency could not reach, and definitional inconsistencies get cleaned up over the course of years, sometimes following the lead of the market which had to operate based on educated guesses.