Year in review: PIRG’s 2024 highlights

DENVER – This year, PIRG’s national and state-based advocates won victories that both improve the quality of our lives now and put us on a path to a better future. These new policies will benefit the public across the United States.

“While our country may seem polarized, we can all agree that making sure consumers are treated fairly, promoting public health and protecting the environment make America a better place,” said PIRG President Faye Park. “The gains we made in 2024 come from years of persistent work by our advocates, supporters and allies. Advancing the public interest is like planting seeds which, with consistent attention, eventually flourish. We look forward to planting more next year.”

PIRG and its state groups, together with our partners and supporters, celebrated the following highlights and milestones in 2024:

Freedom to fix our stuff

The Right to Repair campaign continued to make waves in 2024, helping to tackle the e-waste crisis and giving consumers more control over their stuff. Thanks to state lawmakers and the Right to Repair coalition of tinkers, fixers, makers and environmental and consumer advocates, major tech companies partially reversed their stance on the issue. Google publicly supported Right to Repair legislation in Oregon and, on the same day that a Right to Repair bill was being heard in the Colorado Senate, Apple announced it would ease some restrictions on repairing iPhones. The Colorado legislature passed the bill and Gov. Jared Polis signed it into law on May 28, giving Coloradans the broadest repair rights of Americans in any state.

We celebrated Repair Independence Day as laws in Minnesota and California took effect and made repair materials more available.

We continued to urge the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to take action on the Right to Repair, delivering more than 50,000 petitions and submitting a letter to the FTC with 15 other groups about the problem of ‘software tethering’, whereby manufacturers use software to control how devices function after a consumer has purchased it. Subsequently, the FTC published a report, citing our letter, which found that 89% of smart products surveyed failed to disclose on their websites how long the products would receive software updates. 

It was revealed in court documents that the FTC is investigating tractor manufacturer John Deere for potential unfair or deceptive practices related to “the repair of agricultural equipment.” 

Microsoft announced that schools can pay as little as $1 per computer to extend their Windows 10 security updates. The decision came after PIRG delivered more than 20,000 petition signatures calling on Microsoft to extend the life of computers with Windows 10 operating systems. This followed PIRG’s successful effort to get Google to extend support for Chromebooks to 10 years. 

Empowering consumers and exposing harmful business practices

Our Consumer Watchdog team held companies accountable for a range of questionable business practices in 2024. As a consumer watchdog, PIRG for decades has called out businesses when they act in a fraudulent or harmful manner. We also push for protections to stop such practices happening in the first place and praise businesses when they do the right thing.

Thanks in part to our work over many years, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued new rules that offer new or enhanced consumer protections. 

The CFPB issued rules limiting credit card late fees and overdraft fees, and took action to help consumers make informed decisions when they shop for credit cards. In addition, the Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge to the CFPB from the payday lending industry, reaffirming the constitutionality of the CFPB’s funding.

The FCC tackled ‘junk fees’, requiring cable and satellite TV companies to disclose all costs up front and requiring businesses involved with live-event tickets or short-term lodging to “clearly and conspicuously” disclose the final, total price including all mandatory fees any time they offer, display or advertise any price. Also, the FTC announced new rules requiring companies to make subscriptions and memberships easier to cancel.

The Federal Aviation Authority Reauthorization passed by Congress contained dozens of new consumer protections. They included defining airlines’ obligation to issue prompt, no-hassle refunds to customers who want them when flights are canceled or significantly delayed. The new protections followed years of work by our team and several fellow consumer advocacy organizations.

In 2024, PIRG also raised awareness about food recalls, fake online product reviews, unwanted robocalls and companies that sell personal data without permission. The CFPB released a proposed rule to restrict the sale of Americans’ online information by third party “data brokers.” Maryland passed one of the strongest data privacy laws in the nation to give consumers greater security online. A similarly robust data privacy law passed in Nebraska will go into effect on January 1, 2025. 

Tackling waste and toxic threats

To give consumers the information they need to protect their health, U.S PIRG Education Fund filed a lawsuit against gas stoves producer Haier US Appliance Solutions, maker of GE Appliances. The suit alleges that the company is violating the District of Columbia’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act by failing to warn consumers that normal operation of its gas stoves produces air pollution at levels that can be harmful to human health. Rather than seeking damages, the complaint asked the court to order Haier to warn District consumers that GE Appliances’ stoves produce air pollutants that pose a health risk. 

In California, CALPIRG helped to pass legislation to ban plastic grocery bags, closing a loophole in the previous law that allowed stores to still distribute thicker plastic bags. CALPIRG also helped pass the landmark Textile Recovery Act to tackle the urgent problem of waste and overproduction in the fashion industry. The new law requires clothing companies operating in California to create and fund a program to help clothing get reused, repaired and recycled. 

Following our public campaign, Costco, the world’s third-largest retailer, agreed to make visible its plastic footprint for its signature Kirkland Brand products and unveil a five-year action plan to reduce plastic packaging by year’s end. Our network also persuaded global entertainment giant Disney, toymakers Hasbro and Mattel, hotels Marriott, Hilton, and Choice Hotels, and other companies to disclose their plastic footprints and/or set goals to cut plastic use. Amazon announced a plan to phase out plastic air pillows from its packages by the end of 2024. 

State PIRGs successfully advocated for restrictions on PFAS chemicals in firefighting gear in Massachusetts; in cookware and other products in Colorado.

In response to the massive increase in satellite launches, we issued a report looking at the growing problem of “space junk.” The report showed how the launches create hazardous soot pollution and that, once launched, the satellites can impact our climate and ozone layer by burning up in our atmosphere and ruining our view of the night sky.

Our report called on the FCC to conduct environmental reviews for satellite launches and we organized a letter from 120 astronomy, astrophysics and space experts from top universities to the FCC asking the agency to study the effects of satellite mega-constellations on space, the atmosphere and environment.

Standing up for patients and high value health care

PIRG has long campaigned to end surprise medical bills, leading eventually to Congress passing the No Surprises Act, which became law on January 1, 2022. But the act contained a significant loophole which still allows ground ambulances to send out-of-network surprise bills. 

PIRG’s health care expert Patricia Kelmar served as the consumer representative on the  advisory committee appointed to make recommendations to Congress to solve the problem. She worked with her peers to recommend strong patient protections, such as a ban on surprise billing for both 911 response and hospital-to-hospital emergency transportation and ensuring that a patient’s co-pay is capped at an amount that doesn’t deter them from calling for an ambulance when they need one.

Meanwhile, following our work to support passage of state laws against ambulance surprise billing, 18 states now protect people in state-regulated health plans.

PIRG has also been pushing for years for solutions to the high prices of health care — including winning the right for Medicare to negotiate better prices for prescription drugs. This year, President Joe Biden announced new negotiated prices for 10 costly and widely used prescription medications. The new prices are expected to save patients and the Medicare program about $6 billion per year and should help about 8.8 million older Americans who take certain medications to treat diabetes, psoriasis, heart failure, certain blood cancers and other conditions. 

Competition between generic, biosimilar and brand name drugs creates lower prices for patients and insurers. That’s why PIRG backed the Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act, that will help stop drug companies from creating “patent thickets”, a way of misusing patent law to keep prices for certain drugs and vaccines sky-high. This Act was included as part of the final legislative package Congress is negotiating. If passed, we hope to see savings at the pharmacy counter when lower-priced biologic drugs can more easily compete with the brand name versions.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law, sponsored by CALPIRG and other groups, that will prohibit the appearance of medical debt on Californians’ consumer credit reports. The legislation is similar to laws passed in New York, Colorado and a rule that the CFPB is considering for national implementation.