Congress doesn’t seem ready to move quickly on AI; tech may not wait

Terry Gerton Congress. Both chambers are back in Washington this week, but apparently only briefly. Let’s start with the schedule. The House says they’ve got four days. The Senate started with a What are you hearing now?

Loren Duggan Well, I think the House will stick to those four days, even though there are already calls from some lawmakers to stay around. But the Senate, like you said, has three weeks on the books, and I think it’ll depend on what they really want to get done and what they can get done over that period of time, whether it gets truncated or not, because on the other side is, of course, campaigning for the midterm election, which is one of the reasons why they are curtailing their time in town, certainly on the House side.

Terry Gerton There are a lot of unfinished homework assignments on their desks on both sides of Congress. What do you think is reasonable to see move forward over the next four days or two weeks?

Loren Duggan We might see progress towards final action on bills, but not necessarily the final action right now. So what we’re seeing in the Senate is some votes maybe around cryptocurrency legislation, college sports legislation, things that have been in the works for a long time and an effort to try and push those forward right now. But with the House leaving town, even if those got across the line, I’m not sure that the House would have enough time to deal with them. On that side, on the House side, you’ll maybe see them clear the Russia sanctions legislation that the Senate passed in August. That’s named for Sen. Lindsey Graham, who passed away, and would impose new sanctions around Russia and Iran and has some bipartisan support, but also some bipartisan questions. So we’ll see if that can get over the line. Otherwise, there are a number of bills on the House schedule to try to move forward; some that could go to the president, some that would maybe just move forward. But they’ve given themselves something like 70-plus bills to tackle, some very, very quickly, mind you, but we’ll see what of that they can get done before they leave, presumably on Thursday.

Terry Gerton There are some really important ones on that outstanding list. FISA is still unresolved. The Farm Bill is still unresolved. Do you see any prognosis for success on either of those?

Loren Duggan We’ll see on the Farm Bill. Sen. John Boozman, who’s the chair of the Agriculture Committee, would like to hold another markup. He tried in August, but didn’t have enough support; he’ll see if he can get that going again. On FISA, we hear some rumors about that or rumblings about that, but that’s been lapsed for several months without any action there, so we’ll see if that can be revived or taken care of. But I think that a lot of things are getting put into the “what we’ll do after the election” bucket. That lame duck session is starting to look busier and busier all the time. And of course, it’s September. Normally we’re talking about government funding, but that was taken off the table as an issue because they cleared that continuing resolution already that funds us till December 11th and kicks talks on that and the surface transportation bill and other things past the election as well, with clarity that they won’t shut down at the end of this month.

Terry Gerton Let’s push on the Senate agenda a little bit further. They could convene committees around the appropriations bills, which they haven’t done yet. They may also have confirmation hearings. Do you see any of those on the agenda?

Loren Duggan More of the latter. I see some confirmation hearings happening as they think through who they want to get done now, or maybe tee up to do action on later. One bucket that we might see some action on are judges. The first vote of the week that the Senate took was on a judge, and there are others they want get through. Keith Sonderling’s nomination to become Labor Secretary, that’s one that’s out there. We’ll see if they can make progress there. So I would see some work done on that. Maybe, again, setting up a package; maybe a small one now and a bigger one for the end of the year. On appropriations, I don’t think we’ll see much movement. For one thing, like we said, the government’s funded, so that immediate pressure is off. And I think the dynamics after the election will tell us a lot about what kind of bills we’re going to get, for how long, if it’s the full year bills or something like that. And the midterm pressures  — there’s not a lot of reason to release something at this point if they’re not able to get to the floor with them. And Susan Collins, the appropriations chair, is in a tough reelection battle and might be focused on that. Also, the absence of Mitch McConnell for a large portion of the year has made it harder to get that starting point deal that you need to write the individual bill. So I’d be not shocked 100% if some movement happened, but it doesn’t seem like that’s in the cards right away.

Terry Gerton Loren Duggan is the deputy news director for Bloomberg Government. Loren, let’s turn to even more topical news; we don’t always have a chance to cover that. But AI sort of ate the headlines over the weekend in terms of the key tech leaders saying we’re in real danger here, and suddenly Congress across the board, across the parties, seemed to be very interested. And yet, as we’ve just been discussing, there are not a lot of workdays left. Help us kind of reconcile what they’re saying with what they might be doing.

Loren Duggan You’re right that there’s a great deal of interest in the subject right now, from the White House to Capitol Hill to industry and beyond. And the thing is that with them leaving at the end of this week in the House and maybe just in a couple of weeks in the Senate, there’s probably not enough time to do legislation around this. But what they can do is start having conversations and hearings and conversations with people in industry about what needs to be done here. There have been long talks about AI regulation and what to do about it. Everything from the debate we had last year to preempting state rules around this, where a number of states have started putting guardrails, if you will, in place. But we’ll see what direction this heads in now. I think, first, Congress likes to get information. They like to hear from people. And that might be what we see first in terms of what happens. But, you know, it’s a hard thing with technology, sometimes, to regulate it because it moves so fast that it can get beyond the structures you put into place. That’s long been a concern about technology regulation.

Terry Gerton That’s a really important point. And so when you think about who has the bona fides on the Hill, in either chamber on either side of the aisle, to actually convene and lead these kinds of conversations?

Loren Duggan There are lawmakers who have focused on tech. There’s an AI bill that’s been out there for a while by Jay Obernolte, he’s a California Republican, Lorie Trahan, a Massachusetts Democrat. They have been part of a working group and put things out there; their bill was introduced several months ago, but it’s really not gone anywhere yet. Trahan was a member out there last week saying, “maybe we should cancel our recess and talk about this rather than going away.” We’ll have to see if that gains traction. But people like that, or other working groups where people either had dove in on this issue professionally or maybe in their past lives; there’s folks out there like Don Byer of Virginia, if I’m not mistaken, got a degree in AI or he went back and took some classes in it to try to learn more. So there are lawmakers out there who have focused on this and obviously there’s a number of committees involved which can make it difficult, because there’s the committees that focus on tech but then there’s things like the Judiciary Committee if we’re talking about liability shields or anything about the legality of that that might get involved as well. You could quickly get a spread of a number of people involved in this.

Terry Gerton And the White House messaging seems to be diametrically opposed — nothing to worry about, nothing to see here. When you have that difference in messaging, how hard will it be for Congress to find a way through that conversation?

Loren Duggan That may make it harder, certainly in the short term. It does create a contrast as well, if you will. And people might begin to run on that. I don’t think that aspect of AI has been the focus in terms of the regulation in politics. Data centers, which is an AI-adjacent issue is a campaign issue and is coming up. But maybe you’ll start to see, we want to regulate AI and they don’t, or, you know, maybe that’s another counterpoint that people can start making. But you’re right; the president has come out and said, “you don’t really need guardrails when you have me as the president and industry.” And one of the lines that we were hearing from a number of quarters is, what is the U.S. going to do about AI vis-a-vis China? Because a lot of people see China’s role in AI as something to be concerned about and wanting to stay ahead of them and, you know, an America-first type policy when it comes to AI — that might be coming into the discussions as well.

Terry Gerton This does seem to pose a real challenge in governance for agencies. Federal agencies are exploring deployment of AI in their own programs and processes. And yet, if we take kind of a six-week legislative regulatory vacation from this while we’re out campaigning, and technology moves, that leaves the agencies in a real limbo. They don’t have guidance. They don’t know what rules to follow. Do you see that level of question resonating on the Hill?

Loren Duggan I haven’t yet. Lawmakers are still getting back into town and we’ll see what they say, and maybe meet face-to-face and have some of the conversations they want to have, both across the aisle and within their individual caucuses. We’ll see if that comes up. I mean, that’s the thing with AI — it evolves so fast and the headlines change from week to week. The whistleblowers that came out and said what they’ve said, and some the incidents with AI communicating with other AIs; I mean, that’s beyond just coming up with large language models or stuff like that that we’ve been talking about for a while. Processing large numbers of comments, which are things that agencies are probably interested in as well. So we’ll have to see how the government continues to deal with this on both branches. Maybe the judiciary will deal with it as well. I mean, it’s something every company is thinking about and every agency head probably has some concern in their minds as well.

Terry Gerton Maybe that brings us back to where we started in terms of schedule, because they’ll all be spending the next six weeks out on the campaign trail. What should we be listening for as they’re testing their talking points?

Loren Duggan I would see, what do they keep going back to? What do they start dropping, too, if you stop hearing about certain issues. But it seems like gas prices remain consistently up there. Data centers are going to be an issue. The president wants people to treat him like he’s on the ballot, and I think that’s something both parties may consider how to deal with that. Do they run as a Trump Republican? I’m sure a lot of Democrats will run against him. We’ll see how that plays out over the next several weeks.