by Anna Claire Vollers, West Virginia Watch
May 5, 2025

The fate of more than 15 million customers’ genetic data remains in limbo after popular DNA testing company 23andMe filed for bankruptcy in March. The data is up for sale, stoking fears about how it might be used and prompting attorneys general from more than a dozen states to warn 23andMe users: Delete your data.

“Your genetic data is your most personal, confidential data, and you should be able to protect who has access to it,” North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson, a Democrat, said in a March statement.

“You have the power to delete your data now — please act quickly.”

Dr. Adam Brown, a Washington, D.C.-based emergency physician and the founder of a health care strategy firm, deleted his information on 23andMe as soon as he learned of the bankruptcy filing, he told Stateline.

For him, the bankruptcy begs a vital question that federal and state laws don’t fully address: What happens to your genetic data when the company holding it collapses?

Federal protections are flimsy. States have beefed up their genetic privacy laws in recent years, but many experts say they don’t go far enough.

23andMe has said the bankruptcy will not change how it stores, manages or protects its trove of sensitive customer information. In a news release issued shortly after the bankruptcy announcement, the company said any potential buyers would have to agree to comply with 23andMe’s consumer privacy policy and all applicable laws. When contacted by Stateline, the company declined to comment beyond what it has published in news releases and information it posted for customers on its website.

But once the data is in the hands of another company, that company could change its privacy policy at any time, experts noted.

“Once you get to the point of bankruptcy court, there may not be those same guarantees or the same ethos a new company may have around privacy protections for consumers,” Brown said.

“I want people to understand there actually are not a lot of data privacy protections for consumers, especially for these direct-to-customer-type businesses.”

HIPAA doesn’t help

Companies such as 23andMe offer their users potentially game-changing revelations about their health and ancestry. The process is simple: Mail in a saliva sample and the company uses it to build an individual genetic profile that can reveal not only a person’s family connections, but also health insights such as their risk of developing a disease like cancer or Alzheimer’s.

This valuable personal data underpins a direct-to-customer genetic testing market that was valued at $1.93 billion globally in 2023 and is expected to grow, according to market research firm Grand View Research.

23andMe was an industry giant until its stock price plummeted following a massive 2023 data breach that affected the accounts of nearly 7 million customers. Then came the $30 million class-action lawsuit settlement.

The company declared bankruptcy in late March of this year, and announced it’s up for sale.

A flurry of alerts from state attorneys general around the country soon followed. AGs from states including Alabama, Arizona, California, Kentucky, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Texas issued similar press releases that recommended customers ask the company to delete their genetic profile and destroy the saliva sample used to create it.

“We have robust state privacy laws that include data deletion rights, and I would encourage any Texan concerned about their data to exercise the right to have their data securely deleted,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, said in an April statement.

The fear is that a new 23andMe owner could choose to use or share sensitive personal genetic data in ways the company’s current privacy policy doesn’t allow. There’s worry it could be used, for example, to inflate people’s life insurance premiums or expose them to employment discrimination.

And there aren’t many guardrails to prevent that from happening.

HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, doesn’t apply to companies like 23andMe. The landmark federal law protects patients’ sensitive health information when it’s handled by doctors, hospitals and health insurers. But direct-to-customer companies such as 23andMe or Ancestry aren’t considered health care providers, and their non-invasive saliva collection kit isn’t considered a medical test.

The main federal law that protects people from discrimination based on their genetic information is nearly 20 years old. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) was passed in 2008, long before the rise of at-home testing kits. It applies to employers and health insurers, but not to life insurance companies, mortgage lenders and other non-health entities. And it doesn’t explicitly protect epigenetic information, which is information about the way a person’s genes — and by extension, health — are affected by outside factors such as smoking, disease or stress.

What states are doing

In the past five years, at least 14 states have passed laws regulating direct-to-consumer genetic testing offered by companies like Ancestry and 23andMe. There’s variation, but generally the laws require companies to get customers’ express consent before using or sharing their data, and allow customers to request their genetic data be deleted and biological samples destroyed.

It’s a good start, but doesn’t go far enough, said Anya Prince, a University of Iowa law professor whose research focuses on health and genetic privacy.

Many of those state efforts were built around a model law developed by the Coalition for Genetic Data Protection, an industry group with two member companies: 23andMe and Ancestry.

As DNA testing kits exploded in popularity and attracted increased scrutiny from lawmakers, the coalition pushed to influence legislation and set industry standards. The privacy protections in the laws mirror what 23andMe and Ancestry were already doing with their own privacy policies, experts say.

“They do have some really sensible privacy protections,” said Prince. “It’s great that people can delete their genetic data, and it’s great that law enforcement needs a warrant to access it. But if a privacy advocate had written a model law, there would be the potential for more and broader protections.”

For example, she said, many of the state laws address privacy requirements just for direct-to-consumer DNA testing companies. If 23andMe’s data is bought by, say, a pharmaceutical company, those state laws no longer apply.

The coalition now appears to be inactive, its website defunct.

Since 2020, more than a dozen states have passed some version of a genetic information privacy law, including Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming, based on a Stateline analysis. This year, the Indiana legislature passed a bill that’s now headed to the governor’s desk. Bills have been introduced this year in other states, including West Virginia.

Prince said state laws rely too heavily on consumers to self-manage their data privacy. They’re expected to understand a company’s policy, when studies have shown the public often doesn’t read privacy notices nor fully understand how companies use their data. Further, many state laws don’t address how third parties, such as law enforcement, can access and use consumer genetic data.

It’s also not always clear how the laws will be enforced, or who’s responsible for oversight.

“In general, I think there’s a disconnect between how people think their privacy is protected and how it’s actually protected,” she said.

But a few states have enacted laws that are more robust. California, for example, has a genetic information privacy law, but also has a general data protection law, as well as a state version of the federal GINA law that extends genetic anti-discrimination protections into areas including housing, education and licensing.

Florida has beefed up its DNA privacy laws in recent years, making the using or selling of an individual’s DNA without informed consent a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison and up to a $10,000 fine. Florida was also the first state to prohibit life, disability and long-term care insurance companies from using genetic information to determine coverage.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

West Virginia Watch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.

The post 23andMe users’ genetic data is at risk, state AGs warn appeared first on westvirginiawatch.com

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

This content presents a balanced view focusing on consumer privacy concerns related to genetic data held by 23andMe, highlighting legal and regulatory gaps without leaning heavily toward partisan political positions. It includes statements from both Democratic and Republican attorneys general, expert opinions, and facts about federal and state laws. The coverage raises awareness about privacy and regulatory issues in a factual, non-ideological manner, typical of centrist or neutral reporting.

by Allison Prang, West Virginia Watch
May 3, 2025

WASHINGTON —  President Donald Trump and his team have signaled a strong interest in continuing to strengthen federal support for nuclear power, an energy source Democratic states are increasingly open to expanding.

The administration’s loudly pro-nuclear position creates a rare point of overlap between Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, whose signature legislation funded hundreds of millions in tax credits for low-carbon energy sources, including nuclear power.

Trump during his first roughly three months in office issued multiple executive orders mentioning nuclear energy, casting his broad energy strategy as a way to expand the country’s power resources and shore up its security. State lawmakers are also pushing their own policy moves, sometimes just in an effort to set themselves up to embrace nuclear power at some point in the future.

“There are a lot of really positive signals,” said Rowen Price, senior policy adviser for nuclear energy at Third Way, a centrist policy think tank.

But Price said she’s concerned that support for nuclear power could be swept up in bigger political fights, such as many congressional Republicans’ goal of axing clean-energy tax credits in Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. The administration’s broad cuts to the federal workforce could also eventually hurt the government’s nuclear ambitions, she added.

The promise of a nuclear resurgence in the United States isn’t a new goal for the industry or its backers in Washington, D.C., but how successful efforts to expand nuclear power generation will be in the U.S. — a metric that hasn’t budged from around 20% in decades — remains to be seen.

Americans’ support for the energy source, meanwhile, is just short of its record high, a recent Gallup Poll found. And more blue states have also started to embrace nuclear power, which has traditionally been more favored by Republicans, to reach climate goals and grow electricity capacity amid anticipated increases in demand.

But even as interest in states grows, the cost of building nuclear infrastructure remains an impediment only the federal government is positioned to help scale.

‘Renaissance of nuclear’

Energy Secretary Chris Wright in April talked about the administration’s desire to elevate nuclear power by making it easier to test reactors, delivering fuel to next-generation nuclear firms and utilizing the department’s Loan Programs Office to help bring nuclear power projects online.

“We would like to see a renaissance of nuclear,” Wright said at the news outlet Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington. “The conditions are there and the administration is going to do everything we can to lean in to help commercial businesses and customers launch nuclear.”

Wright said he wants the department to help launch 10 to 20 new nuclear reactors to get the industry moving again and to bring down costs. The department’s loan office could make debt investments alongside large-scale data center companies that use massive amounts of power to build nuclear projects and then exit those deals after the projects are built, allowing the office to recycle that funding, he said.

The department recently announced that it approved a third loan disbursement to reopen the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Covert, Michigan, which Holtec has been working on doing for the last few years.

Last month, the department said it was reopening $900 million in funding to help companies working on small modular reactors after changing some of the Biden administration’s guidance on the program.

Federal workforce cuts

Third Way’s Price noted that a portion of staffers at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — which she described as already “tightly constrained” — are eligible for retirement either now or in the next five years.

Workforce cuts at the Energy Department and elsewhere could also hurt efforts to grow the nuclear power sector, she said.

“Frankly, all of the verbal support from this administration for nuclear only matters if they’re actually going to put forward and implement policies that support it,” Price said. “We need to make sure that they do it.”

An Energy Department spokesperson said in an email that it “is conducting a department-wide review to ensure all activities follow the law, comply with applicable court orders and align with the Trump administration’s priorities.”

The agency said it didn’t have a final count on how many staffers have left the department through its resignation program, but noted that it doesn’t necessarily approve all requests. The department didn’t comment on how many staffers focused on nuclear energy have been laid off.

Nuclear programs were among those affected by the Trump administration’s pausing of federal programs and funding, said David Brown, senior vice president of federal government affairs and public policy at Constellation Energy, which runs the biggest fleet of nuclear plants in the country. But Brown said that even so, the industry is coming out on top.

“I think what we are seeing is that as they work through their various review(s) of programs that they’re greenlighting the nuclear stuff,” Brown said.

Federal support crucial, but politics tricky

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill could also change the outcome for industry, for better or worse.

Wright, in his remarks last month, said he hopes Congress will take action to help expand nuclear energy, and said lawmakers could do so in the budget reconciliation package on which the U.S. House has started to work.

Republican House members have not yet released text of the sections of the package that will deal with energy policy. Wright said support for nuclear power could be included in the reconciliation package, but some advocates are also worried that the package, or the annual appropriations bills, are the exact kind of political battles that efforts to support nuclear power, like the tax credits, could get tied up in.

Some state lawmakers point to financial support from the federal government as essential for the industry to grow, even if states make their own headway to build support for nuclear power.

Colorado state Rep. Alex Valdez, a Democrat who sponsored a bill signed into law this session to include nuclear in the state’s definition of clean energy, said he hopes the administration follows through on its admiration of nuclear power with funding for states.

“Generally, states do not have the financial resources the federal government does,” Valdez said. “It’s going to be the federal government that puts their investments behind these things, and that’s what’s going to enable states as a whole to be able to move forward on them.”

West Virginia Watch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com.

The post States’ nuclear energy growth needs federal action to follow Trump’s vocal support appeared first on westvirginiawatch.com

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Centrist

The content presents a relatively balanced view on nuclear energy, highlighting the bipartisan support for its growth, with mentions of both Republican and Democratic policymakers advocating for it. The article presents a range of perspectives, from Trump’s administration’s focus on nuclear power to Biden’s support for low-carbon energy, including nuclear. Additionally, it touches on concerns about federal workforce cuts and political battles that could impact the growth of the nuclear sector. While the article covers both sides of the political spectrum and does not overtly favor one viewpoint, the tone remains generally neutral with an emphasis on the technical and policy aspects of nuclear energy expansion rather than political divisions.

SUMMARY: The Marmmont Library in West Virginia is closing after nearly 50 years, with its last day being Friday. The library operated out of an aging trailer with structural issues, prompting this decision. Despite the closure, plans are underway to develop a new facility with community input, aiming to better serve local needs through a five-year plan. Books and materials will be transferred to other branches in the Canal County Public Library system, and programs will continue at the Marmet Rec Center. Starting May 8, a bookmobile will visit the Marmet location weekly to maintain library services in the area.

MARMET, W.Va. (WCHS) — The Marmet Public Library is opening its doors for the last time on Friday, but how does the future for library services in the town look?

FULL STORY: https://wchstv.com/news/local/marmet-library-closes-after-50-years-plans-for-new-facility-underway#

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