House Republicans forecast ‘light touch’ regulatory approach to AI under Trump
Republicans on the House Judiciary Administrative State, Regulatory Reform and Antitrust Subcommittee offered a preview Wednesday for how they plan to approach artificial intelligence this Congress: with a “light touch.”
During a hearing on AI trends in innovation and competition, Republican lawmakers made their case to relax regulations around AI companies, praising President Donald Trump’s executive order calling for a review of the Biden administration’s AI directive and the rescission of work stemming from that EO.
In his opening statement, Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, R-Wis., who chairs the subcommittee, said the country needs to be the best place in the world to build, test and deploy AI. That can only be achieved by protecting free speech and ensuring that entrepreneurs are shaping the future of the emerging technology, he added.
“Unfortunately, some in government want to step in and start regulating before they even understand what they are regulating,” Fitzgerald said. “They want to decide which models are, quote unquote, responsible, which approaches are fair and who gets to build what. That’s very dangerous. We see this same saga playing out time and time again; overregulation can kill innovation.”
Rep. Mark Harris, R-N.C., applauded the Trump administration’s leadership on lowering barriers to American leadership with AI, as well as solidifying the nation’s position as the global leader in AI. The administration is seeking public feedback on its AI action plan, which Lynne Parker, principal deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, called the “first step in securing and advancing American AI dominance.”
Democrats on the subcommittee, however, had plenty of concerns about the president’s AI approach, connecting its anti-regulatory stance with its embrace of Elon Musk’s DOGE. Minority members also spoke to the need for processes to protect the public from algorithmic bias, job displacement and more.
“While with one hand the administration is undermining regulation of AI, with the other hand, it is handing massive troves of sensitive data on millions of Americans to Elon Musk and his DOGE team that could be used to deploy AI throughout the government,” said Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y.
Nadler, the subcommittee’s ranking member, said the executive branch has “done all it can to hobble the [Federal Trade Commission] and to weaken enforcement of antitrust and consumer protection laws.”
Other Democrats expressed concerns about what Musk might do with the data DOGE has accessed via federal agency IT systems. Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., pointed to troves of data DOGE seemingly accessed via Treasury Department and Social Security Administration systems. Johnson said Musk, the world’s richest man, is in an especially “unique position” as “tech support” for the White House and the owner of X, which features an AI chatbot called Grok.
“We know that DOGE has already copied massive amounts of our personal data onto its servers,” Johnson said. “That amount of data to train his AI model would give ‘Co-President’ Musk a huge edge over his competitors.”
