SACRAMENTO, the Trump administration is signaling it’s finally ready to push cannabis rescheduling forward, more than four months after President Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Justice to complete the process in “the most expeditious manner.”

That’s a significant shift. The federal machinery on rescheduling had gone quiet since the order, and California’s licensed cannabis industry has been watching closely, knowing that moving cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III under federal law could reshape everything from banking access to research funding.

On the congressional side, Reps. Dina Titus (D-NV) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) introduced a bill this week to authorize $150 million for cannabis research, a measure that would also allow state regulatory agencies to supply cannabis directly for use in federally approved studies. Right now, Department of Cannabis Control-licensed cultivators in California can’t legally supply product to federal researchers. That wall could start to come down if the bill gains traction.

California growers in Humboldt and Mendocino counties have complained for years that the research gap leaves them without data to counter prohibition-era claims about potency and public health. A federal research authorization of this scale would be the biggest shift in that space in decades.

Back in Sacramento, the California Assembly Business and Professions Committee advanced a bill that would let dispensaries offer drive-thru windows. Local governments would still have approval authority, so don’t expect a statewide rollout overnight. But for dispensaries in suburban markets where foot traffic is low and convenience drives purchasing decisions, this matters. Several Southern California operators told industry groups earlier this year that drive-thru options could cut wait times and help compete with unlicensed delivery services that don’t follow any rules at all.

The new polling data adds political weight to all of this. Nearly six out of 10 Americans now support legalizing cannabis, with majority backing across party lines. More striking: 84 percent want legal medical cannabis access for patients. That’s not a niche position anymore. That’s a supermajority, and federal lawmakers from competitive districts are going to notice.

Marijuana Moment also covered a Connecticut House vote this week to eliminate THC caps on cannabis flower and concentrates while raising potency limits on cannabis-infused drinks. California set its own THC limits through the Department of Cannabis Control’s existing regulations, and any federal rescheduling could prompt a fresh look at how states calibrate those rules.

In Virginia, lawmakers rejected Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s proposed amendments to recreational cannabis sales legislation and sent the original bills back to her desk. She can sign them, veto them, or let them become law without her signature. That standoff matters because Virginia’s regulatory choices ripple through East Coast policy conversations the same way California’s choices do on the West Coast.

Alabama is a different story entirely. Medical cannabis sales there are expected to start next month, nearly five years after the state legislature passed its legalization bill. Five years. California’s operators sometimes complain about DCC processing times, and those complaints are legitimate, but Alabama’s timeline puts California’s licensing bureaucracy in a different light.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) also threw a wrench into the hemp sector this week, introducing a bill he said would push back against what he called an “industry-ending ban on hemp with just the stroke of a pen.” Hemp-derived cannabinoids have been a gray-market headache for California’s licensed dispensary operators for at least three years, with out-of-state delta-8 and delta-9 products moving through gas stations and convenience stores without state-level testing or labeling requirements that DCC licensees must follow. Any federal clarification on hemp rules, in either direction, will hit California’s market directly.

The thread running through all of this is federal movement. Rescheduling, research funding, hemp regulation, polling data showing broad public support: the landscape that California regulators and cultivators have operated inside for the past decade is shifting. The Drug Policy Alliance has tracked these federal signals closely, and their read is that 2026 could be the year that federal and state cannabis policy stop operating on completely separate tracks. California’s licensed industry built itself inside a set of federal constraints that may not look the same by the end of this year.