Acting Librarian of Congress seeks funding boost for enterprise AI platform

The Library of Congress is asking lawmakers for a few million dollars to fund a centralized AI platform that its top official said will break through a “roadblock” the facility faces in managing data securely to provide better services.

Robert Newlen, the acting Librarian of Congress, told members of the Senate Appropriations Legislative Branch Subcommittee on Tuesday that the library’s $5.4 million fiscal 2027 budget request for the AI platform will help the LOC both adjust to staff reductions and improve work processes.

“But in order to use confidential data to ensure data integrity and privacy and to train AI on our unique data types,” Newlen said, “we need to be able to develop and manage AI models in a controlled and secure environment. Without an AI platform of our own, we will be left behind, as will Congress.”

Newlen said the LOC staff has “made significant strides in harnessing AI,” but the library has gone as far as it can by tapping into “existing resources to underwrite” experimentation with the emerging technology. 

“We have reached the point where our very talented staff, who have explored many options for work processes that we can improve and service to Congress, but we’ve hit a roadblock because we don’t have a secure platform to do this,” Newlen said.

For example, the LOC-managed Congressional Research Service has a plan to address a backlog of bill summaries on congress.gov. This Congress alone, more than 14,000 bills have been introduced, according to Newlen — a figure that he said “really exceeds the capacity” that its 12-person staff can manage.

With an enterprise AI platform, that impossibility becomes a reality, he said, enabling CRS to “more efficiently” and “more securely” manipulate big data sets of that kind and deliver analysis, research, bill summaries and more to Congress at a faster pace. 

Newlen’s plans for the technology drew particular attention Tuesday from Sens. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., the co-chairs of the chamber’s AI caucus. Rounds was especially interested in the LOC’s plans for choosing an AI platform — specifically, if the library planned to contract with a commercial hyperscaler to develop a product that would be available for members of Congress to use.

In exchanges with Rounds and later Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, Newlen revealed that he recently spoke with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about ChatGPT and the LOC’s “initial efforts to use AI for applications that would provide better service to the Congress and to the American people.”

The acting Library of Congress chief said he and Altman “really didn’t drill down into the details,” but he was able to make clear that everything the LOC does with the technology must produce accurate, authoritative and nonpartisan information for lawmakers. Newlen said the library would “certainly be willing to take the lead” on developing an AI platform that “could serve the entire Congress.”

“One of the most important aspects of [the platform] would be the confidentiality, the way that we could design it to ensure that all of … the legislative data … would be secure and that we would be able to process it in the way that we need to deliver to Congress,” Newlen said.

Rounds and Heinrich have been working on legislation for agencies to test AI systems in sandboxes without the threat of enforcement actions, with the idea that government and industry could arrive at a “better understanding” of how those systems work. 

The South Dakota Republican asked Newlen if he needed congressional authority to do some of that testing for LOC’s AI platform, and the librarian said he believes he’s in the clear, but it’s “certainly something that we would be willing to pursue.”

Beyond Newlen’s hopes for funding for the enterprise AI platform, he’s also looking into ways AI can support LOC’s talking book and braille production. And the library’s AI working group continues to evaluate new products, have conversations with contractors and others in the “greater AI community,” and do whatever it can to keep the resource “up to date.” CRS, he noted, has delivered five cloud-hosted tools using AI. 

“I think this is just the tip of the iceberg of things that we can do that will free our staff to do the higher level kind of analytical work that [Congress values] the most,” he said.