It looks like the USCF has put its new rules in opposition to those of FIDE, the international chess federation. According to the FIDE handbook here (scroll down to 2.2 and 3.2), non-citizens need reside for at least three years after they have given FIDE notification of their change of chess federation in order to be eligible for FIDE team and individual events.
So by dropping the USCF residency requirement to one year like they did a few weeks ago, they place the US rules in a contrary state. The USCF has many rules that differ from FIDE's and that's no crime, but this means they will end up producing qualifiers from US events who are ineligible to play in the events they qualified for! The US championship functions as a zonal for the world championship and (some) winners are placed on Olympiad teams. So they would have to skip some ineligible players and move down to the next eligible player.
The question is whether or not players should be participating in US championships if they aren't considered eligible by FIDE to represent the US. I believe the Netherlands had the most complications with this sort of thing. They had no restrictions and ended up with Sokolov and Nikolic playing in the Dutch championship and representing Bosnia in the Olympiad in the same year (Twice! 1998 and 2000), which seems completely ridiculous.
