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Congress is moving H.R. 8870, the BUILD America 250 Act, a major transportation bill with language limiting liability for app-based transportation companies. For Uber, that language points straight at crashes, sexual-assault claims, insurance costs, and state-level lawsuits. Members of Congress are also disclosing UBER purchases, putting their portfolios next to legislation that could make Uber more valuable.
Every time an Uber ride goes wrong, a passenger or driver can try to bring legal claims over what happened inside the trip. If that trip ends in a crash, assault, serious injury, or death, the lawsuit can reach beyond the driver and toward the company that built the platform.
That is the legal risk Uber has been trying to narrow because legal claims, insurance reserves, and litigation costs sit directly inside the company's financial model. In June 2026, House members warned party leaders that the new transportation bill could shield rideshare companies from liability for crashes and sexual assaults. Their letter named Uber directly and said the company faces more than 3,000 sexual-assault claims in federal court.
The warning came after Rep. Vince Fong offered a May 21 amendment to H.R. 8870 with a section titled Vicarious liability for network companies. The language covered app-based drivers, digital networks, prearranged transportation, and on-demand delivery. House Transportation and Infrastructure adopted it 35-30, then ordered the full bill reported 62-2.
Uber's March 2026 lobbying registration put the ask in plain language: vicarious-liability protection tied to surface transportation reauthorization. In simple terms, Uber wanted Congress to handle liability rules inside the same legislative process that writes national transportation policy.
The April filings widened the pressure campaign.
Uber and outside lobbying firms disclosed roughly $1.5 million in Q1 federal lobbying expenses across transportation, auto insurance, litigation, Mobility on Demand, autonomous vehicles, non-emergency medical transportation, labor classification, tax, food delivery, data privacy, and artificial intelligence.
From the federal side, the reports listed the House, Senate, Department of Transportation, Federal Transit Administration, Department of Labor, Department of Energy, and other federal offices. The liability fight sat inside a much broader push over how app-based transportation gets regulated.
In this case, the names around UBER are hard to ignore: Nancy Pelosi, John Hickenlooper, Gilbert Cisneros, and Ro Khanna all appeared in the trade window. Nancy Pelosi just disclosed a purchase of $500k-1mln Call options in Uber Shares expiring next year.
A 5% reduction on a $4.9 billion annual insurance-reserve addition base is about $245 million before tax. A 10% reduction is about $490 million. A 20% reduction is about $980 million, close to a billion dollars. If the market capitalized those after-tax savings at 18.5 times earnings, the equity-value range would be roughly $3.6 billion, $7.1 billion, and $14.3 billion.