Federal panel to fast-track immersive tech—with limited consumer safeguards
S. 1106 — United States Leadership in Immersive Technology Act of 2025 · Filed by Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) · 1 cosponsor · Introduced Mar 25, 2025 · Referred to committee
Your members of Congress
Enter a ZIP to see where your representative and both senators stood on this bill.
Looked up on this device — your ZIP is never stored on our servers.
What it does
This bill establishes a federal advisory panel to study and promote U.S. leadership in immersive technology (augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality). It creates a principal advisor role at the Department of Commerce, establishes an Immersive Technology Advisory Panel with representatives from multiple federal agencies and private-sector experts, and requires a comprehensive study within two years on how immersive tech affects U.S. economic competitiveness and national security. The panel will make recommendations on standards, cybersecurity, privacy safeguards, and federal-private sector collaboration.
Why we flagged it
The bill's core function is to establish federal infrastructure (advisory panel, principal advisor, study mandate) to coordinate government and private-sector strategy around immersive technology. It is fundamentally a technology-promotion and industry-coordination mechanism, not a consumer protection or public-interest bill, despite rhetorical framing around competitiveness and national security.
What the text implies
- The advisory panel's composition (6–10 private-sector experts, multiple federal agencies) creates a formal public-private governance structure that may accelerate immersive-tech deployment with limited independent consumer-protection oversight.
- The study's focus on 'economic competitiveness' and 'national security' may justify fast-tracking immersive tech into critical sectors (healthcare, public safety, education) before privacy and accessibility standards are mature.
- The bill does not mandate binding privacy or data-protection standards; it only recommends them, leaving implementation to future rulemaking or industry self-regulation.
- Framing immersive tech as a 'national security' priority may enable classified or accelerated procurement and deployment in federal agencies, reducing public transparency.
Who it affects
The bill creates transparency mechanisms (public reporting, advisory panel with civil society input) and addresses legitimate public concerns like privacy and data protection. However, the primary beneficiaries are technology companies and the defense/national security apparatus; ordinary citizens gain mainly indirect benefits through potential job creation and innovation, while facing potential privacy risks from accelerated immersive-tech deployment without clear consumer protections in place.
Who stands to gain
- immersive technology hardware manufacturers
- AR/VR software and platform companies
- defense contractors with immersive-tech applications
- semiconductor firms (e.g., Marvell, as mapped)
Named in the bill
Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of State, Department of Labor, Department of Education, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Transportation, Department of Agriculture, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Immersive Technology Advisory Panel — and 2 more
Where it stands
1 cosponsor: 1 Democrats.
- Mar 25, 2025 — Introduced · Congress.gov: “Introduced in Senate”
- Mar 25, 2025 — Referred to Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation · Congress.gov: “Read twice and referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation”
Dates and quoted wording are Congress.gov's action record; the timeline shows status changes, not every procedural step.
Money around this bill
2 lobbying clients named this bill on 3 disclosure filings across 2 quarters, Dec 2025 to Jun 2026. Those filings disclosed $6,970,000 in lobbying spend. A filing names 72 bills on average, so that figure is what each filing reported, not a share belonging to this bill.
More lobbying clients named this bill than 41% of bills with at least one filing.
Marsha Blackburn, the sponsor, reported $133,620 in PAC receipts in the 2026 cycle.
- Google Client Services LLC — $6,920,000 on 2 filings
- Xr Association — $50,000 on 1 filing
Lobbying Disclosure Act filings through Jul 20, 2026. A filing shows who paid to lobby on a bill it names, not what changed.
How this was measured
Analysis — Quorum's AI read the full bill text on Jun 10, 2026; transparency and hidden-provision scores are compared against the median of 16,222 analysed bills.
Status and sponsors — Congress.gov's bill record — actions, committee referrals and cosponsors — loaded nightly. The timeline shows status changes, not every procedural action.
Money — Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings whose specific-issue field names this bill for quarters ending Dec 2025 to Jun 2026. A filing's amount is reported whole beside the median number of bills a filing names; it is never divided across them. PAC receipts are FEC-reported contributions to the sponsor's candidate committee in the 2026 cycle.
As of — lobbying records through Jul 20, 2026 · page rendered 2026-10-20.
“Federal panel to fast-track immersive tech—with limited consumer safeguards” QuorumCivic. https://share.quorumcivic.app/bill/119/s1106 Report an error
The week in bills
One email, Sunday: what Congress passed, what it changed, and who paid.
One link arrives to confirm the address. It is used for this email and nothing else, and every issue carries an unsubscribe link.