▶ 0:17:54Good morning. The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will now come to order and we welcome everyone this morning. Without objection, the chair may declare a recess at any time. And I recognize myself for the purpose of making an opening statement. Good morning and thank you for joining us for this discussion on the federal government and artificial intelligence today. AI is no longer some futuristic idea.
▶ 0:18:20It's here and it's already reshaping everything from healthcare and national defense to finance and fraud pres prevention. The federal government has a responsibility to harness this technology to make government work faster and more efficiently for the American people. Today, we'll highlight the critical uses of AI in the federal government, which create efficiencies, improve services, and save taxpayers a whole lot of money.
▶ 0:18:46The Department of Defense is using AI to improve decision-making, and protect our men and women in uniform. Federal agencies are using AI to detect fraud before it happens by using the technology to identify patterns of fraudulent behavior and working proactively to prevent improper payments. AI agents are beginning to help the administrative tasks, freeing up federal employees to focus on their mission instead of paperwork.
▶ 0:19:12However, barriers remain and challenges must be addressed so the government is to fully realize the benefits of this transformative technology. For example, many outdated legacy IT systems don't integrate with new technologies. A cumbersome procurement process limits agency access to some of the best new technologies, including those utilizing AI.
▶ 0:19:33And poor data management leads to information silos and duplicative work, which costs taxpayers money and prevents agencies from realizing the full potential of AI. This committee has continued to highlight these challenges and will play a major role in addressing them, including by continuing bipartisan legislative efforts from last Congress.
▶ 0:19:54This includes the bipartisan federal AI governance and transparency act led by chairman comr and then ranking member Rascin which laid out a vision for transparent and trustworthy AI use in government. It also includes the AI training extension act which I sponsored last Congress and reintroduced today. This bill will equip federal employees with the AI literacy and skills necessary to leverage AI across the federal government.
▶ 0:20:20I ask unanimous consent to enter into the record a statement from the chairman comr highlighting the pivotal role this committee has to ensure agencies deploy AI responsibly and the bipartisan efforts of the committee on these issues. Without objection, President Trump has rightly identified the importance of US dominance in AI and has taken action to remove unnecessary barriers and unleash innovation. This is a refreshing reversal from the heavy-handed regulation first approach to AI taken by the Biden administration.
▶ 0:20:50Last Congress, my subcommittee on cyber security, information, technology, and government innovation held multiple hearings on the disastrous impacts of overreaching policies, and I was relieved to see the former President Biden's AI executive order rescended on day one. This was a critical first step and since then the White House has directed agencies to prioritize the deployment of AI and improve procurement processes to eliminate barriers to the federal government's use of AI.
▶ 0:21:16I believe it's important for this committee to watch these developments closely and work to ensure the executive branch has the tools and authorities to deploy AI at scale and realize the full potential of this incredible technology. I want to thank each of our witnesses this morning for sharing their time with us today and I look forward to hearing from each of you. I also want to thank my my colleagues from the other side of the aisle who showed up in great number this morning too. I appreciate your interest in this topic. This has been a bipartisan topic for this committee.
▶ 0:21:46And with that, I would like to recognize ranking member Lynch for his opening statement. Thank you very much. Good morning, Madam Chair. And again, thank you for calling this hearing on the use of artificial intelligence in our government. Uh, optimizing the federal government's use of technology has long been a bipartisan priority of this committee.
▶ 0:22:04Indeed, as as you know, Madam Chair, our late colleague and friend Jerry Connley was a steadfast champion for using modern technology to improve the delivery of government services, strengthen oversight, and enhance public trust. We continue to fight his fight on this and so many other critical challenges facing our government.
▶ 0:22:24We cannot sit here, however, and have the traditional bipartisan conversation about federal IT modernization without acknowledging the fact that the Trump administration, Elon Musk, and Doge are leading technology initiatives that threaten the privacy and security of all Americans and undermine our government and the vital services it provides to red states and blue states.
▶ 0:22:49Musk may say he has stepped away from his role in the federal government, but his recklessness will continue to have devastating consequences for America for years, possibly decades to come. Today, we'll work to better understand the disaster and danger the Trump administration has created by turning our government over to his biggest campaign donor and people who are more interested in self-enrichment than public service.
▶ 0:23:13Since President Trump's inauguration, he has given Elon Musk free reign to terrorize our ci civil servants and drive more than 275,000 federal employees from their jobs serving the American people. His Doge team has done this so capricciously that they have had to go back to people that they originally fired and beg them to return to their jobs, serving our veterans, maintaining our nuclear stockpile, and fighting bird flu.
▶ 0:23:40At the Social Security Administration, whistleblowers have told us that the agency has lost so many critical information, technology, and support staff that very few of the remaining workers even know how to handle errors or alerts in their computer systems. This could mean missed checks and millions of seniors and people with disabilities losing access to their financial lifeline.
▶ 0:24:01While they purged the federal government of expertise, Elon Musk and Doge reportedly fed sensitive government data, including America's private personal information into unvetted and unaccountable AI software. They also reportedly deployed Musk's own generated generative AI chatbot called Grock to consume government data and assist with sensitive government decisions.
▶ 0:24:26Grock has even been deployed onto systems at the Department of Homeland Security despite the fact that it has not been approved for use. Musk has been operating without any oversight whatsoever while posing a very real risk of violating security and privacy laws, accessing confidential information about his competitors and using valuable federal databases to turbocharge his own AI system, which would mean more money and more power for Mr. Musk. The American people deserve answers.
▶ 0:24:57Musk and Doge have put the most personal data of every American at risk. Cyber security experts like Mr. Schneider, who is here with us today, are sounding the alarm that the whole the holes Doge has created in our national cyber security system are gaping and pervasive.
▶ 0:25:14And now in this horrifying insecure environment, the Trump administration wants to centralize all of America's data into one massive database, which would allow full spectrum surveillance of American citizens, making it even easier for bad actors to hack. And of course, they're contracted with a big private tech company owned by one pre one of President Trump's billionaire supporters to do just that.
▶ 0:25:41Four months ago, Democrats moved to subpoena Elon Musk to provide public testimony to this committee. At that time, our Republican colleagues complained that their constituents were calling them their offices and showing up to town halls to yell at them about Musk.
▶ 0:25:54While Americans concerns have only deepened since then, from his erratic purge of the federal workforce to his exploitation of sensitive taxpayer data to the cyber security nightmare he's created and the horrifying surveillance state we fear, Musk has built the Musk has put the American people into a position where they demand answers from Elon Musk. I believe too that my Republican colleagues should have had some questions of their own for Mr. Musk.
▶ 0:26:23Recent allegations have left Americans wondering if he was potentially under the influence of drugs while at the very heart of the Trump administration's most consequential and sensitive decisions. It is worth investigating whether one of President Trump's most influential advisers was under the influence of heavy drugs while upending hundreds of thousands of American lives, breaking government services beyond repair, and handing out death sentences for hundreds of thousands of innocent people around the world who relied on American foreign aid
▶ 0:26:53and medical care for survival, most of whom were children. If this if this doesn't move my Republican colleagues, maybe they just want to hear from Musk on why he called their bill to cut Medicaid and give tax ps to tax breaks to billionaires. This is Trump's word. This is uh Elon Musk words.
▶ 0:27:11A disgusting abomination and quote massive outrageous pork fil congressional spending bill or why he spent the last 24 hours leveraging his social media to quote kill the bill. Or maybe they want to know why Musk has said that his next round of firings might be targeted at them. Republican politicians who have not towed the line on Musk's priorities.
▶ 0:27:36Regardless of your motivations, Democrats and Republicans alike simply cannot allow Elon Musk to escape accountability for his actions. He's dismantled our government, endangered Americans, and weaponized public service for his own financial gain. I ask my Republican colleagues, let's work together on this. Let's support oversight that Democrats today in moving that this committee subpoena Elon Musk to answer for his actions. All of us deserve answers on behalf of the American people.
▶ 0:28:06So, Madam Chair, therefore, pursuant to clause 20 2K6 of House Rule 11, I move that we subpoena this committee, Republican and Democrat, subpoena Elon Musk to testify before this committee. Seconded motion. We'll suspend for a moment. Thank you.
▶ 0:29:29Chairwoman, point of order. When When are we gonna vote on subpoenenaing Musk? We are uh doing a point of order right now with the parliamentary. Madam chair, thank you. We are suspended. Madam Madam chair, may I be recognized? Yes, sir. Madam chair, move to table the gentleman's motion. Okay. The motion is not debatable. As many as as many as are in favor of tableabling, signify by saying I. I.
▶ 0:29:58All those opposed signify by saying no. No. after recorded in the madam chair the y have it and the motion to table is agreed to the committee will now resume consideration interesting opinion madam chaired vote is requested parliamentary inquiry okay a recorded vote is ordered and the clerk will call the role okay we're going to suspend to allow the clerk to get ready parliamentary yes sir madam chair thank you is it the
▶ 0:30:28custom of the committee to shut down debate on such an important This is not This is not an inquiry. It's not an inquiry. We're suspended. Massachusetts mentioned that Mr. Musk is was potentially under debatable right now. I love you. It's not debatable right now. This is not a point of inquiry. And other uh other But you look good in front of the photos. You look great right now. You look good. So, is this the You're not recognized right now. There's not a point of inquiry. Thank you. We're suspended until the clerk is ready to call the role.
▶ 0:31:01Move to call the role. We are suspended again for the third time. We're suspended until the clerk can call the role. Thank you. I know. I know how the job interviews are going.
▶ 0:31:24Which which gentlemen get posted on how the job interviews are Do you really want us to sit down? Take the mic. We'll have Let's debate. We take ourselves too seriously. You know, I have a pretty good sense of humor. And I always bring it to the table.
▶ 0:32:11Madam Chair, point of inquiry. Right. Okay. Is the clerk here? The clerk is here and preparing. The clerk is here and preparing to call the role. Okay. Uh thank you. Can you can you explain exactly what preparing requires? She has to get paperwork. She has to get seated. She has to do all that. Thank you. She sure does. Yes.
▶ 0:32:43Or you guys have to find your members who didn't attend the hearing. That's probably more likely. It's it's kind of Madam Chair inquiry, please. Yes, sir. Do you want more video with Elon behind you? You already got a good clip. Could we Could we have a unanimous consent uh motion to structure debate for 10 minutes? Each side gets five minutes.
▶ 0:33:12We're in the middle of We're getting ready. We can't do that. We We're not able to do that right now. Let's do the recorded vote and then we can talk about it after. Thank you. Why? Go ahead.
▶ 0:34:16Parliamentary inquiry. government. Yes, ma'am. Do we have an assistant clerk that can move maybe a little bit faster? We have a room full of people. This is not an inquiry. Thank you. It it was a question. Do we have an assistant clerk? It's not a parliamentarian inquiry. So, no, we're not having this debate. But it is a point of order. It's not uh and we're parliamentarian. A motion to table is not debatable. Thank you. We're not debating that. It's not We weren't asking for a point of order.
▶ 0:34:49Would the parliamentarian rule on a point of order? Is the parliamentarian the gentleman must state his point of order? It was the gentle lady's point of order that was overruled because it was determined that it was not a point of order when in fact it is. I think that she should be allowed to. She stated it was an inquiry, not a point of order, my recollection. But if she would like to restate it, that's fine. Madam Chair, point of order. Yes, ma'am.
▶ 0:35:20Do we not have an assistant clerk who can make sure that we can continue to do the business in an efficient way in oversight because it has historically never taken this long for the clerk. We're going through the process right now and we'll have a recorded vote as soon as we're able to. Mr. to restate the ladies the lady's point, the general lady's point.
▶ 0:35:48Uh, Democrats are here. We think this is an important issue. We are ready to vote and the gentleman must state a point of order and we we welcome the opportunity to debate this. This is a serious issue. Is there a point of order, Mr. Lynch? The gentleman has the floor. Let him finish. I'm the chairwoman. Thank you. Women are allowed to speak on this committee.
▶ 0:36:15And I ask for a point of Point of inquiry. Can we just Madam Chair, point of inquiry as a woman? I know. I should hopefully I get to speak. Yes, ma'am. Yes. Yes, you are. Yes, you are.
▶ 0:36:42Babe, is it possible for us to just do a roll call without the clerk to determine what members are here so that we can determine if they all really have the votes? No, ma'am. Thank you.
▶ 0:37:14For those of you watching at home, the Republicans are not in the room, so they're trying to find their members so that they can You are not recognized, Miss Stansbury. Thank you. You can be quiet now. Neither are any of your members because they're not in the room. Thank you.
▶ 0:37:45Madam Chair, on a on a point of order, Democrats have a have a clerk that is available to make to to record our vote. Mr. Lynch, the chair will not entertain points of order regarding the propriety or expediency of a proposed course of action. This is my final ruling on such points of order. Thank you, Madam Chair. point of inquiry then? Yes, sir. Would it not be permissible to have the Democratic clerk record the vote and to begin it now?
▶ 0:38:16No sir, it's not. Thank you. Madame Chair is Madam Chair. Yes, ma'am. Is the only reason we can't take a vote is because y'all were about to lose it. Uh, is there a point of inquiry here? Because I didn't hear one. That That was my inquiry. Is is the reason that's not a valid inquiry. Thank you. Oh, okay.
▶ 0:38:55I have a point of inquiry, Madam Chair. Uh I I was just wondering sir being new to this committee what's the basis or rule on which you are overturning not allowing the democratic clerk to start the vote we have our own clerk to journal that's why is that based in a rule or it's based on the fact that you guys lost the election because of your crazy and you guys don't control the chamber. Is that is that in the rules?
▶ 0:39:30Uh, Madam Chair, just wanted to follow up. Would appreciate an answer to the Is there something in the rules that prevents We have witnesses who've flown in from around the country. This is committee practice. Thank you for your inquiry and we'll start the vote momentarily. Thank you.
▶ 0:40:33Madame Chair, just a point of inquiry. It it has it has now been it has now been 10 minutes and and this motion is simply to bring Mr. Musk forward so that we can ask him questions on behalf of the American people. I think the Democratic position has been very reasonable, uh very deliberate. You've got you got a lot. The motion is to table and there's no debate. Thank you, Mr. Lynch.
▶ 0:41:22Again, Madam Chair, the Democrats are all here and we're ready to vote. It is now 11 minutes. You're not recognized. But you do look good for your clips later for social media with the with Elon and all the words behind you. Looks good. Appreciate it. The blue is good with the red. I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. Really appreciate that. Thank you, Madam Chair. Parliamentary inquiry in a minute. Will it be another minute?
▶ 0:41:52probably 12, right? Could be. It's debatable depending on the math, I
▶ 0:43:07Chair, Madam Chair, I have unanimous We're we're in the middle of getting ready to vote, so we can't do that right now. We can do that after. Is Is that the rule? because the clerk has not been ready for the last 15 minutes almost. You're not recognized. Thank you. So, we're not doing unanimous consent. Not in the middle of a motion to table and a recorded vote we're preparing to take. Is the clerk seated? You are not recognized right now. Thank you.
▶ 0:43:38Okay. Since we're sitting here in silence uh for the You are not recognized and there's no point of inquiry. You are not recognized. Okay, I'll do a point of Okay. Um, I am seeking an inquiry to determine whether or not it is okay to put it into the record that at the time that this motion was called, only Mr. Gosar, Mr. Gothman, Mr. Higgins, Mr. Fallon, and Mr.
▶ 0:44:09Crane along with yourself were the only Republicans that were actually in the room. This is not a a real point of inquiry. You're not recognized on it either. Thank you. Madam Chair, I have a legitimate point of inquiry.
▶ 0:44:36Madam Chair, Madam Chair, is it for real this time? Oh, no. It's it's it's very legitimate. Very for real. How much taxpayer money are Republicans wasting while delaying this vote to submit? That's not a legitimate point of inquiry. It's very legitimate to the American people. Thank you. It's not the American people. It's not and you're not recognized on it. Thank you, Madam Chair. Parliamentary inquiry.
▶ 0:44:59How much uh how much taxpayer money was wasted when uh some of the Democrats didn't show up to work for almost two years during I love you, Mr. Particularly one from Boston. Also, not a point of inquiry. Thank you. Who are you talking about? I'm sorry. Are you engaging in personalities right now? Who are you talking about? Who are you talking about? I didn't say anybody's name. Who are you talking about? This is not time for debate right now. Thank you. Well, please. I'm being respectful of everybody on both sides there.
▶ 0:45:28Let's Let's be respectful of one another, please. I'm from Pittsfield and I was This is not debatable. We're not having a debate on this. We're getting ready to take a recorded vote. Everyone can sit down and turn their microphones off unless you have a point of inquiry, an appropriate point of inquiry. Thank you. To be on the House floor eulogizing a black woman dying in Georgia because of your policies.
▶ 0:47:54Madame Chair, point of inquiry. Yes, ma'am. You said that we were about to take the vote in cons Oh, the clerk. Yes, we're about to take the vote. Never mind. Because I was about to say your your members finally showed up. I mean, let's let's go. Thank you, ma'am.
▶ 0:48:41How's it phone. It's been interesting. Lots of delay tactics. All right, a recorded vote is ordered and the clerk will call the role. Good stuff. Yeah, we only hit the Yeah, good stuff. Mr. Jordan. Mr. Jordan votes yes. Mr.
▶ 0:49:15Turner, Mr. Gosar, Miss Fox. Yes. Miss Fox votes yes. Mr. Growthman, yes. Mr. Growthman votes yes. Mr. Cloud. Yes. Mr. Cloud votes yes. Mr.
▶ 0:49:45Palmer. Mr. Palmer votes yes. Mr. Higgins. Mr. Higgins votes yes. Mr. Sessions. I. Mr. Sessions votes I. Mr. Bigs. Mr. Fallon. I Mr.
▶ 0:50:15Fallon votes I Mr. Donald's. Yes. Mr. Donald's votes yes. Mr. Perry I Mr. Perry votes I. Mr. Timonss yes. Mr. Timonss votes yes. Mr. Burchett. Mr. Burchett votes yes.
▶ 0:50:43Miss Green Miss Green votes yes. Miss Boowbert. Miss Luna. Miss Luna votes I. Mr. Mr. Langworthy. Mr. Berles. Yes. Mr. Berles votes yes. Mr. Crane.
▶ 0:51:15Mr. Crane votes yes. Mr. Jack. Mr. Maguire. Mr. Maguire votes yes. Mr. Gill. Mr. Mr. Gil votes yes. Mr. Lynch, Mr. Lynch votes no. Miss Norton. No. Miss Norton votes no.
▶ 0:51:46Mr. Krishna Morphy, no. Mr. Krishna Morphy votes no. Mr. Kana, no. Mr. Kana votes no. Mr. Mfume, no. Mr. Mfume votes no. Miss Brown, no. Miss Brown votes no. Miss Stansbury. Miss Stansbury votes no. Mr.
▶ 0:52:16Garcia, no. Mr. Garcia votes no. Mr. Frost, no. Mr. Frost votes no. Miss Lee, no. Miss Lee votes no. Mr. Casar, no. Mr. Casar votes no. Miss Crockett, no. Miss Crockett votes no.
▶ 0:52:45Miss Randall, Miss Randall votes no. Mr. Subermanium. Mr. Subermanium votes no. Miss Ansari, no. Miss Ansari votes no. Mr. Bell, no. Mr. Bell votes no. Miss Simon, no. Miss Simon votes no.
▶ 0:53:15Mr. Min, no. Mr. Min votes no. Miss Presley, no. No. Miss Presley votes no. Miss Tibbe. Madame Chairwoman I. Madam Chairwoman votes I. And how is Mr. Biggs recorded? Mr. Biggs is not Mr. Biggs votes I. And how is Miss Boowbert recorded?
▶ 0:53:45Miss Boowbert is not recorded. I. Miss Boowbert votes I. Not yet. Madam Chair, parliamentary inquiry.
▶ 0:54:18The clerk will report the tally. Madame Chairwoman, on this vote, the eyes's are 21, the nays are 20. The eyes have it, and the motion to table is agreed to. The committee will resume. Here we go. Okay. I now request unanimous consent that Representative Moscowitz of Florida and Treyan of Massachusetts will be waved on to today's hearing for the purpose of asking questions.
▶ 0:54:46And without objection, so ordered. I am pleased to introduce our witnesses for today's hearing. Our first witness today is Mr. Yil Ili Baraktari, the president of the special competitive studies project. Our second witness is Mr. Bobin Shaw, founder and chief executive of the AI company Move Works. Our third witness is Miss Linda Miller, former deputy executive director of the pandemic response accountability committee and founder of Triclat.
▶ 0:55:15Our fourth witness is Mr. Adam Theorer, senior research fellow at R Street Institute. And our fifth fifth witness today is Mr. Bruce Schneider from the Harvard Kennedy School. We welcome everyone and we're pleased to have you here this this morning. So, pursuant to committee rule 9G, the witnesses will please stand and raise your right hands. Do you solemnly swear or affirm the testimony you are about to give is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
▶ 0:55:45So, help you God. Let the record show the witnesses all answered in the affirmative. We appreciate all of you being here today and look forward to your testimony. Let me remind the witnesses that we have read your written statements and they will appear in full in the hearing record. Please limit your oral statements to 5 minutes. As a reminder, please press the button on the microphone in front of you so it's turned on and the members up here can hear you. When you begin to speak, the light in front of you will turn green. After four minutes, the light will turn yellow.
▶ 0:56:12When the red light comes on, your five minutes has expired and we would ask that you please wrap it up. So I now recognize Mr. Baktari to please begin your opening statement. Chairwoman Mace, Ranking Member Lynch, and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify here today. I'm here to make one clear point.
▶ 0:56:33While developing advanced AI is a significant uh moment, the true measure of a nation's future advantage won't be who has the best models, but who has built the essential digital infrastructure and fosters the deepest adoption of AI across all of the society. To understand the stakes, imagine if at the beginning of the last century, our nation had failed to embrace electricity and yielded that transformative advantage to our competitors.
▶ 0:57:02the consequences would have been devastating. Today we face a similar moment. The strategic competition in AI with People's Republic of China is intensifying. Since 2017, Beijing has launched an ambitious campaign to achieve technological supremacy as the key to its global dominance. China is executing this strategy by dedicating vast resources to integrate AI across its entire economy, society, and military.
▶ 0:57:29For example, they recently announced 47.5 billion semiconductor fund which is designed to eliminate reliance on western technology. They are on track to surpass the US in raw R&D spending having already tripled their investments since XJP came to power in 2012 to 500 billion in 2024. This is all built on dominant infrastructure including more than 60% of the world's 5G base stations.
▶ 0:57:56This entire effort is backed by state sponsored cyber espionage and intellectual property theft designed to acquire and weaponize advanced technology. While the United States still leads AI in research, our primary disadvantage is the slow adoption of these breakthroughs. We are hampered by bureaucratic inertia, outdated IT infrastructure, and a lack of AI literacy in the workforce. Overcoming these barriers is the key to winning the global tech competition.
▶ 0:58:26To secure our leadership, United States must take decisive action in the following areas. First, we need to establish a high level technology competitiveness council at the White House modeled on the approach we took for the space race to coordinate a unified national strategy and drive rapid AI adoption across the government. Second, we need to significantly increase our investment in AI infrastructure by doubling uh non-defense AI R&D spending to 32 billion over time and codifying the national AI research and resource.
▶ 0:58:56Third, we need to launch a comprehensive national talent strategy to make the US the magnet for AI experts. This means eliminating green card caps for the top STEM talent and promoting AI literacy throughout our educational system. Fourth, we must overhaul the federal procurement process to rapidly integrate cutting edge AI from our most innovative companies. Lastly, we must strengthen our global alliances in AI, 5G, and cyber security to ensure the resilience and security for us and our allies.
▶ 0:59:26The bottom line is this. This is not just a competition of invention, but of adoption. It's about who can set the rules for the future. We have faced moments like this before. From the space race to the digital revolution, our nation's greatest strength has always been our ability to unite our vision with decisive action. By embracing this challenge together across government, industry, and academia, we will not only secure our leadership, but build a more prosperous and secure future for all Americans.
▶ 0:59:55Thank you, and I look forward to your questions. Thank you. I'll now recognize Mr. Shaw for his opening statement. Chairwoman Mace, Ranking Member Lynch, and distinguished members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify on government use and procurement of AI. I am Bob and Shaw, CEO and founder of Move Works. Move works is an enterprise AI company that has spent nine years successfully helping some of the world's largest organizations to use AI to transform their operations. Today, we face a moment of national importance.
▶ 1:00:23The question before us is not whether the federal government should adopt AI. It's whether we will lead or follow. Before we talk about the procurement hurdles that we have faced, let me explain to you what Moveworks does. Moveworks is uh MoveWorks transforms how organizations support their employees. We do this through an enterprise AI assistant and employees interact conversationally with the assistant in a chatbased interface. They can get IT support, ask HR questions, and find company information. But the assistant is not just for looking up information.
▶ 1:00:50It can also be used to take action such as scheduling time off or obtaining software licenses. Behind the scenes, our platform integrates with all of an organization's technology systems. Because the AI assistant is a single unified tool, employees no longer have to log in and out of multiple systems to get work done. Organizations can extend the system to simplify and accelerate their most complex business processes. All done safely and securely while respecting permissions.
▶ 1:01:15We do this work by combining top tier language models like OpenAI's GPT4, Meta Lama 3, as well as other models from Google's Deep Mind, Microsoft, Nvidia, just to name a few. We put these together with our own enterprise specific models, all governed by enterprise grade card guard rails, including factchecking, citations, and security filters. The result is AI that understands work context. It handles complex business processes safely and effectively, and follows industry-leading data protection and privacy approaches.
▶ 1:01:43Today, Movework serves 5 million employees across 350 organizations, including major companies like Broadcom, Marriott, and CVS Health. We're also used by a number of local governments such as Scottsdale, Ventura, and Durham County. In addition, government contractors like Lidos and Northrup Grumman use Moveworks to make their businesses more efficient. We've seen firsthand how AI drives measurable results. Honeywell reduced IT help desk requests by 80%. Broadcom scaled from 10,000 to 50,000 employees without increasing service staff.
▶ 1:02:13And the city of Glendale achieved a 514% return on its AI investment. Our experience positions us uniquely to understand the federal government's complex requirements. The federal government has an unprecedented opportunity. You can leverage AI for efficiency. You can achieve cost savings. You can improve employee experience. And most importantly, you can therefore improve citizen services. We've engaged with agencies across the government and consistently see enthusiasm for AI adoption.
▶ 1:02:40But that enthusiasm has not translated into government procuring AI products like move works. We've encountered three primary barriers. The first is the Fed ramp process. Move works invested three and a half years and over eight.5 million dollars to achieve Fedramp ready status. This is a prohibitive barrier for smaller AI innovators, the companies that often develop the most cutting edge solutions. Second, complex reseller networks. These force innovative companies to work through intermediaries rather than directly with agencies, adding cost without adding value.
▶ 1:03:10Third, multi-year contracting vehicles. These favor large incumbents over agile AI companies. These create delays measured in years. Meanwhile, AI technology advances every month. American AI leadership requires action, not just intention. The private sector has demonstrated that AI adoption can both be rapid and secure when procurement processes match the pace of innovation. I recommend Congress consider immediate steps to improve government use and procurement of AI. Embed AI education and adoption goal in agency leadership performance plans.
▶ 1:03:40Create government developer programs for startups to learn federal systems. Scale AI proof concepts proof of concept programs for rapid pilots to all agencies similar to the investment horizons pilot program developed by the office of the CIO within the Navy. And finally, establish agency innovator programs that allow smaller agencies to serve as test beds for AI implementations. Longer term, we will we must modernize acquisition policies. We must accelerate procurement timelines.
▶ 1:04:08The federal government employs the most important workforce in the world. The workforce that operates our democracy and defends our nation. These public servants deserve the same AI powered tools that are transforming the private sector's productivity and effectiveness. We have a choice. We can modernize our procurement process to embrace AI innovation. Or we can watch other nations take the lead in government AI adoption while our agencies struggle with outdated processes and missed opportunities. I urge this committee to champion procurement reform. We need to maintain our competitive edge while serving citizens more effectively.
▶ 1:04:38Thank you, and I welcome your questions and discussions on these critical topics. Thank you. I'll now recognize Miss Miller for her opening statement. Thank you, Chairwoman, Ranking Member, and members of the committee. My name is Linda Miller. I bring a unique perspective today because I spent 10 years at one of the world's most admired agencies, the GAO, as well as I'm also the the co-founder of an AI technology startup.
▶ 1:05:02So, I'm coming here with both the perspective of the a long history in the history in the oversight community as well as some of the challenges that have already been raised about trying to bring innovative technology to the US government. As Doge is seeing firsthand, it's hard, if not impossible, to try and impose private sector innovation on the federal government, the data challenges alone are formidable. Agencies collect data poorly, if they collect it at all. Programs collect their own data in silos.
▶ 1:05:31They don't share it even amongst themselves, much less with other agencies. In many cases, agencies don't even know who they're paying. They send money to states in the form of grants and from there the money trail is opaque making payment integrity almost impossible. At tracklight to help illuminate who one federal agency was paying. We spoke to a company who foyers data on invoices to state agencies and sells it.
▶ 1:05:58For our federal client, we were going to have to buy the data to tell them who they were paying. The same issue exists at the state level. GAO reported on a grant program that had administered by one state in which a company applied for the same grant 13 times in neighboring counties and got it because states didn't share that data. The size and complexity of the administrative state and the volume of regulations agencies must comply with make agility and innovation next to impossible.
▶ 1:06:26My fellow panelists have made some very smart suggestions about turbocharging the rip and replace efforts of legacy IT systems and removing procurement barriers. But we have to be realistic about how capable government is to enact these rapid changes, no matter how badly they're needed. I could spend my time this morning telling you about how we urgently need to adopt AI across government to remain relevant, achieve cost savings, and improve service delivery as well as prevent fraud, waste, and abuse. But I think you already know that.
▶ 1:06:57So I'd like to talk about what proactively can be done to move the needle. GAO has reported that there's almost 25 existing AI requirements in federal law and guidance today. GSA has established an AI center of excellence which was required by law. Agencies have inventoried AI use cases. They've put in place responsible AI officials, but the government continues to show anemic AI adoption.
▶ 1:07:22Overall, my fear is we've created yet another bureaucratic morass, hamstringing agencies with compliance work and only added the layers of sludge, further slowing down AI adoption. There has been progress. Recent EOS have sought to improve data sharing which will improve agency how agencies better use a better use make use of data to use AI. And GSA's Fed ramp overhaul is a step in the right direction. I completely agree with Mr. Shaw.
▶ 1:07:49spent $8.5 million trying to get Fed Ram certified or and successfully getting Fed RAM certified. My small technology company is going to have to put out millions of dollars to do the same. But AI adoption is the perfect candidate for what's called a regulatory sandbox which which Congress can mandate to speed AI projects to implementation in controlled settings suspending these layers of bureaucracy.
▶ 1:08:13Creative procurement solutions must be explored and carefully monitored, allowing lessons to be learned and shared across agencies. And outdated privacy laws, privacy laws that were designed for a world that was far existed long before the internet, much less artificial intelligence, has to be revised. I cannot state this more clearly. The bad guys have all our data. We cannot protect Americans privacy it in in 2025.
▶ 1:08:43Today, privacy protection is going to have to involve advanced technology like anonymization of sensitive data and the use of other types of identifiers like behaviors and geoloccation. I'd be remiss not to mention the risks which are real. Lazy, careless use of AI doesn't just imperil the goals of the AI project. It undermines the trust in the technology itself. Hallucinations are real. Subject matter expertise is vital.
▶ 1:09:12Responsible AI is not just a buzzword. Humans in the loop means humans who are trained, knowledgeable, and paying close attention. This is not a set it and forget it tool. Now is the time to be bold. We can't change how government operates. Wholesale changes to legacy IT systems and the federal acquisition system will take years. But we can create innovative laboratories where AI projects can operate in proof of concept regulatory sandboxes in carefully controlled environments to start to show the art of the possible.
▶ 1:09:42I welcome your questions. Thank you. Thank you. I'll now recognize Mr. Theer for his opening statement. Chairwoman Mace, Ranking Member Lynch, and members of the committee, thank you for your invitation to participate in this important hearing. My name is Adam Theor. I'm a senior fellow at the R Street Institute where I cover emerging technology policy. My message here today focuses on three key points. First, there are meaningful benefits to governmental use of artificial intelligence technologies.
▶ 1:10:07Second, Congress and the Trump administration need to take steps to unlock those benefits by accelerating the modernization of government systems and policies. Third, we must appreciate the connection between broader AI regulation and the benefits the government itself can acrue from these systems. While the federal government is already integrating AI into systems and processes, progress has been slow and there needs to be more urgency to tap the many benefits that AI can offer.
▶ 1:10:30The bipartisan House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence report from last December noted that quote, "Each year the federal government spends over 100 billion on information technology and cyber security. Approximately 80% of this spending goes to operating existing legacy systems that are typically outdated and underpinned by archaic software and hardware components. AI can help address this persistent problem.
▶ 1:10:51Last year, the US Chamber of Commerce released a study on how improved IT processes and aid agencies already helped to quote modernize infrastructure, enhance citizen services, improve national security, and foster innovation, and unlock significant long-term cost savings and efficiencies along the way. Doing more with AI could generate even broader benefits. Asenture estimates that by tapping AI systems, federal agencies could unleash quote a productivity windfall for the US government worth up to 532 billion annually by 2028.
▶ 1:11:18Just earlier this week, the UK government reported that a new trial of AI tools revealed how civil servants use them, who use them, freed up two weeks a year in working time, and 82% of them said they wanted to continue to use AI tools to boost their productivity. AI tools can be particularly helpful in simplifying paperwork and procedural hassles. AI has already been used to improve public records management at many different agencies, including document declassification and Freedom of Information Act requests.
▶ 1:11:45AI can also help streamline specific regulations and make them more cost-effective to ensure greater value to taxpayers. AI is already helping governments better administer various public services including infrastructure management, public safety efforts, healthcare delivery, environmental monitoring, emergency responses, workforce development, and various other citizen services. As Congress and the executive branch look to continue to clear a path to efficient government AI uptake, the focus should continue to be on addressing barriers to implementation through five main priorities.
▶ 1:12:14First, modernize federal federal acquisition policies to boost AI adoption, especially by encouraging easier acquisition of sophisticated but cost-effective commercial systems. Second, streamline paperwork and use requirements associated with federal AI contracts and deployments, especially for small businesses and open- source providers. Third, ensured government data sets are AI ready and interoperable such that the public, researchers, and other organizations can more easily benefit from them. Fourth, enhance in-house government AI talent and improve technical literacy at all levels.
▶ 1:12:43and fifth, boost trust and security in government technology systems. Congress has already passed several laws to facilitate some of these goals, and bipartisan efforts by both the Biden and Trump administrations have helped expand those efforts, including through chief AI officers and federal agencies. The OM recently released very important guidance requiring agencies to quote adopt a forward-leaning and pro-inovation approach that takes advantage of this technology to help shape the future of government operations and quote harness solutions that bring the very best value to taxpayers.
▶ 1:13:13This committee and others should assist these efforts by helping the administration ensure the agencies are AI ready for the future. That means closer oversight of agency modernization and digitization efforts, plus the necessary funding to get the job done. Finally, Congress should recognize there is an important connection between broader AI policy and the benefits governments can gain from AI systems. Proposals to regulate AI systems are proliferating rapidly with over 1,000 AI related bills already introduced just 5 months into 2025.
▶ 1:13:41If these mandates expand, they will significantly raise the cost of deploying advanced AI systems because complicated, confusing compliance regimes would hamstring developers, especially smaller ones. A confusing patchwork of state and local red tape will not only undermine the market for commercial systems, but it will also undermine the government's ability to choose from a diverse array of competitive cost effect cost effective options.
▶ 1:14:03One recent study from CCIA reported the federal preeemption of state uh level AI regulation would benefit the federal balance sheet by up to 269 billion over the next decade by lowering procurement costs for the federal government. Congress needs to protect the interstate marketplace and ensure a robustly innovative and competitive AI ecosystem can develop. Some degree of preeemption is needed to achieve this goal and ensure a diverse array of cutting edge AI solutions are available to government agencies and to the public as consumers of both private and public services.
▶ 1:14:32Thank you so much for inviting me here today. I look forward to your questions. Thank you. And Mr. Sheerer uh Schneider, sorry. Uh you're now recognized for your opening statement. Thank you and thanks for inviting me. Uh so I'm a technologist. Uh, I've been working in cryptography and cyber security since the early 1990s. I write, I teach, I consult, I start companies. I thought a lot about the role of AI in democratic government. Actually wrote a book on this topic that'll be published in October. Uh, previous four speakers have talked about the promises of this technology.
▶ 1:15:01I want to talk about the national security implications of the way our country is consolidating data and feeding it to AI models. Uh, Chairman Connor said in his statement about this hearing that he wanted to unleash AI responsibly while protecting interests and rights of all Americans. Uh, DOA's actions do exactly the opposite. Over the last few months, uh, DOA's affiliates have spread across government.
▶ 1:15:25They are still exfiltrating uh, massive US databases, processing them with AI, and offering them to private companies such as Palunteer. These actions are causing irreparable harm to the security of our country and the safety of everyone, including everyone in this room, right? Regardless of political affiliation. This unprecedented security risk is a result of two things.
▶ 1:15:47DOA's sloppy cyber security regarding our data and regarding the networks they've accessed and also the overrusting of AI current technology to take over human You all need to assume that our adversaries have copies of all the data Doge has exfiltrated and have established access into all the networks that Doge has removed security controls from. And your data can be used against you.
▶ 1:16:17Right? Consider the coercive power of your financial records or your medical records or the government clearance form you filled out. Whoever you think of as your enemy or an enemy of the United States, they can use this data to coersse you or a family member or a member of your staff. And this is true for any elected official or CEO or police officer or judge or nuclear power plant operator. Like really, it's true for everyone.
▶ 1:16:47The more powerful you are or the more critical your role, the more likely it is that someone will seek to use your data against you. There's also a military concept called preparing the battlefield, which are the things that you do to the enemy in peace time to make wartime easier. So, China hacking back doors into our power grid is an example of that. And preparing to use our data against us is another.
▶ 1:17:13So, you should assume that any significant military action against the United States will start with every general's bank account being zeroed out and maybe your bank accounts being zeroed out because there's nothing more distracting than your distraught families. Data is power. Any entity, government or corporate, that holds individual data has the ability to understand, predict, even manipul manipulate behavior. Right? This is Facebook's business model.
▶ 1:17:40Our government collects incredibly intimate data about Americans, but its power is limited by how that data is organized. There was security in our data being spread amongst different government agencies with different rules governing use and sharing. Using AI to reason across disconnected data stores represents a massive increase in government power and therefore a security threat. Dodge's sloppy security practices also means we can't trust the data they're using.
▶ 1:18:10Did they make copying mistakes? Did some adversaries slip in bad data? Remember that nonsense about 150 year olds collecting social security? That was someone misunderstanding how the data was encoded. Our adversaries are certainly capable of penetrating the security of any of the companies that Dodge gave our data to and just as capable as poisoning our AI systems. Data integrity is vital and good AI fed with bad data makes bad decisions and is untrustworthy.
▶ 1:18:40Irrepal damage has already been done but the damage is ongoing. 2015 China hacked OPM stole data about all federal workers that was a major security breach. Continuous real time access to data is much more dangerous. The longer these vulnerabilities persist, the more adversaries will be able to manipulate data and install back doors. the more they'll be able to manipulate the AIs we're creating and the more they'll be able to secretly influence our policy outcomes.
▶ 1:19:09Sacrificing cyber security in effort to create an AI future not only risks the country, it risks the AIS which in turn risks our justice system, our legislative system, our banking system, national defense and all of us, all of you personally. So thank you and I welcome questions and conversation. Thank you. Thank you. I will now recognize Mr. Gosar for five minutes. Thanks, Chairwoman.
▶ 1:19:34Miss Miller, you described the COVID uh process as a catastrophic event with a high risk of fraud. I agree. I am the only non- US president in the United States to have ever killed a national emergency. I killed COVID. But there's there's not a single receipt, though. And since uh Bill Clinton through Joe Biden, we've spent over 13 trillion. Let me say that again. 13 trillion dollars without a receipt.
▶ 1:20:03Could we use AI to examine the funds spent under CO? Uh it depends on how much where that data is available. Certainly AI can be used to mine any data sets uh that exist. The question I think you're really asking is whether or not that data exists. And uh and I I don't I don't have the answer to that question. Oh, I hope that we'd have some some database because we have a record of where it went supposedly. So it Well, yeah.
▶ 1:20:30So, we have a record of where a lot of the spending went and of course the pandemic response accountability committee, the organization that I helped lead um has a lot of that data on their website about where money was spent uh during the pandemic. When a lot of that money was stolen, something I talk about a lot, we don't know where that money went. A lot of the money that was stolen during the pandemic went to overseas foreign adversarial nation states. So, uh they also could have uh uh how should I say this?
▶ 1:20:56If they were recouping my understanding there was over 2,000 cases in Arizona alone that entities or individuals were actually sued by the government to get it back resulting in compensation of over $300 million. We could use that as well if it if it disappeared. Once again, this is based on the data, right? Yeah, it's based on the data. I don't think I'm qualified to answer that. Thanks. Okay, Mr. Shaw, you talked about our our our procurement system. Uh, boy, it's broken.
▶ 1:21:26So, how would you use AI during that whole process because our overruns in our military are outrageous. How can we keep them on track? How how does that work? Yeah, I think there's a variety of things to talk about on that topic.
▶ 1:21:42one, you can use AI to help with the procurement process itself in terms of analyzing vendors, summarizing u you know submissions, uh generating use cases and requirements for the different agencies that are looking for new technology. But I think before that we need to sort of create an environment where these new technologies that can be applied to procurement or anything else in the US government can make their way into these agencies.
▶ 1:22:10And I think that's a human process problem that we have an opportunity here in this committee to really kind of provide some oversight and correction so that we can go about delivering these great new technologies into these agencies quickly. Right? We've spent years um working on this ourselves to try and get into agencies. But if you look at a lot of these procurement um you know sort of processes, they're multi-year.
▶ 1:22:35They're outdated from the 1990s where essentially, you know, you're thinking about installing software on some server rack that's going to last five years and then it might take two years to actually go through the procurement process. This is untenable for young companies who have limited cash, limited capital, who want to be able to monetize their investments and especially help the US government uh move quickly. So uh could you use something like a blockchain? See, I'm not a techie. I got questions, you know.
▶ 1:23:04Could you use a blockchain to kind of utilize some type I see I'll come back to you in a second but I want Mr. Shaw is there some kind of technology that will help uh preserve some of this data or save us. So we we do not uh deploy blockchain technology for our solution. We focus squarely on what employees can benefit from when it comes to using AI to be more productive.
▶ 1:23:27So I'm unfortunately not able to answer how blockchain could be used here, but generally speaking, technology has been shown in the private sector to have tremendous impacts on their efficiencies and their ability to stay ahead and to lead in the industry. Yes, Miss Miller. Uh I got one more question for you. Could you use AI to audit Medicaid, Medicare and comparisons with hospital versus hospital?
▶ 1:23:53Yeah, that's a very very good use case for AI because you can look at there's a lot of claims data and there's a lot of information on on providers and um you can look at all that data using AI very quickly and identify patterns that look suspicious. Um it's a that it it's an area that I think really is ripe for um a lot of innovation in the space because CMS has the opportunity to really mine a lot of that Medicare and Medicaid data using uh artificial intelligence to identify taxpayer dollars that are being stolen.
▶ 1:24:24Gotcha. Well, I'm out of time. I yield back. Thank you. I'll now recognize Mr. Lynch for five minutes. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Baktari, uh, you mentioned in your testimony the value of educating AI literate workers, right? Uh, and Mr. Shaw, I think you alluded to the same thing.
▶ 1:24:45Uh, about 25 years ago, I I co-founded a a charter school in Boston, uh, a public charter school, and uh, what we did was we we saw that most of the jobs were being that were being created were in math and science and STEM related industries. So, uh, we created this school that doubled or tripled the amount of educational time that students would be exposed to math and science. It's worked very, very well.
▶ 1:25:11Those students score very, very high on math and science and in the Um, unfortunately on Monday, the Trump administration uh rescended $325 million from the STEM education grants that we provide to to feed that type of activity, you know, that that sustain a a move towards, you know, stronger STEM disciplines within our our student bodies.
▶ 1:25:38Um, and that was money that was already authorized, so it wasn't, you know, up for debate. This is the stuff we we we did last year. Is that something that cutting cutting $325 million in in uh STEM grants is is that is that gonna help our effort here on Ranking member Lynch. Um I think we have to be strategic about how we approach AI adoption at all levels of our educational system.
▶ 1:26:04Um I think if you look at what China is doing, they're introducing AI at every level of their educational system. Uh I think for our kids going forward having a capability in their pocket to have access to an Einstein AI agentic application that can help them towards tailored education would be an enormous benefit you know for the next generation learning math and science would probably help as well. I'm going to just reclaim my time. Uh Mr. Schne Thank you though. Thank you.
▶ 1:26:33I I I think you're on the right track there. Uh Mr. Schneider uh can you talk about uh so China has adopted an AI system that is total surveillance of their entire population there. It's non-democratic. It's it's quite oppressive. Uh their goal is to be able to surveil every single member of their society, know what they're doing, know what they're purchasing, and uh for for oppressive reasons so that no one gets out of line.
▶ 1:27:02Can you talk about the to when when we when we adopt when we uh approve uh AI and and and and choose the architecture for our AI, how important it is to make sure that that uh that that respecting uh privacy um independence uh how how important is that
▶ 1:27:33is to have those elements of of democracy, democracy itself uh ingrained and embodied in our AI It's vital and this is why you'll see a lot of movements towards public AI and the notion of an AI model that is not uh built and owned by a for-profit corporation, right? We can imagine other entities creating an AI and that and that's really a matter of trust and integrity.
▶ 1:28:01Can we trust Grock or even the model from Google or or Amazon or any of the other models or do we as a country need a model that is built on American democratic values and not necessarily corporate values. It's critical to think about this. Don't think of it as one AI. There'll be many of them, right? I mean already there over a million models on hugging face that are free and it's becoming cheaper to create these models.
▶ 1:28:28I want you to move to the in your testimony you talked about the dangers that Elon Musk created by the way he was diving into social security uh data and and IRS data and the danger that that presented to the United States u from a national security standpoint and to the privacy of of uh US citizens. Can you talk about that please? I mean and it's really a matter of process.
▶ 1:28:50You know the goal might be a good idea but the reason we have controls around this data who can access under what rules in what configurations are because it's so sensitive and you think about the different data enclaves and whether it's census or military data or OPM data about government employees or health data this is very critical and we as citizens give this data to the government for good reasons and it's kept separate for good reasons and is kept
▶ 1:29:20secure. So when we read about laptops of data being removed, data being given to Palunteer to train models that they're going to use to sell back us, it it the security is is a real Madam Madam, I yield back. Thank you. Thank you. I'll now recognize Mr. Higgins for five minutes. Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Dear, I'm going to be talking with you mostly for the next five minutes.
▶ 1:29:50Um, so I'd like to dig into the uh the controversies regarding the moratorum section of the BBB legislation currently being considered by Congress.
▶ 1:30:06It's it's across the country as part of the narrative of uh of the discussion of AI and and I believe we have an opportunity today to clarify the intent and the specifics of that uh section of legislative language in BBB.
▶ 1:30:30So in that topic and please help me to understand and in doing so help the nation to understand. Good sir. My read of the actual bill states that to that section in particular going to the moratorum under the section of artificial intelligence and information technology
▶ 1:31:01modernization says in general except as provided in paragraph two which is essentially uh an exception to the to moratorum that allows for uh the sovereign states to to enact and enforce laws that remove restrictions on use of AI.
▶ 1:31:28But the paragraph says in general, except as provided in paragraph 2, no state or political subdivision thereof quote unquote may enforce comma during the 10-year period beginning on the date of enactment of bill any law or regulation of that So my read is that the state is not restricted from debating and considering and voting on
▶ 1:31:58and passing and and uh and using their legislative biccameal body in each sovereign state to debate and vote on and pass laws regarding AI and for that that governor to sign that law. the the the the big beautiful bill in section states that uh the federal government is asking for a pause on enforcement.
▶ 1:32:29Am am I right or wrong and please embellish? Yeah. Uh thank you congressman for the question. Um, so, uh, I testified about this in front of our energy and commerce committee just two weeks ago where there was a debate about the AI moratorium and it's important to keep in mind that the reconciliation bill includes specific funding to modernize department of commerce uh, technology systems and there's a concern among members about exactly how that can happen if there's a a whole host of conflicting laws at the state.
▶ 1:32:57The so-called moratorum is is is under that section. That's correct. Please continue. And so therefore that would prohibit certain AI specific types of regulations at the state and local level. Again prohibit the enforcement yes of of state authored regulations that that are AI specific regulations. It's it very specifically says that laws of general applicability are not to be covered by this. Also criminal activity not covered.
▶ 1:33:23And so there are some important exceptions to this and states are going to be free to continue to to act on a lot of these different things. So this moratorum in the interest of time just to clarify for the for the country sir this moratorum does not restrict the sovereign state's right to debate vote on and enact new AI legislation within that state.
▶ 1:33:45It's it's the moratorum is asking the states to recognize that AI by nature is interstate commerce and under this section for modernization of the commerce department of the uh reconciliation bill. We're we're we're stating that the states should refrain from enforcement of their of the new AI laws. Is that correct? Yeah. Yes, Congressman.
▶ 1:34:12And specifically what you said about protection of the interstate, the national marketplace is really crucial and it reflects the broader consensus of Congress going back over the last 30 years about the internet and technology more broadly that there does need to be somewhat of a national framework and make sure that we don't have a parochial patchwork that will interfere with the free fleet flow of algorithm commerce and speech. Okay, that that was a that was wear away explanation. I thank the gentleman. Madame Chair, I yield. Thank you, Mr. Higgins.
▶ 1:34:42I will now recognize Miss Norton for five minutes. Thank you, Madam Chair. Uh government must leverage the best technology uh possible to meet the everchanging needs of the people it serves.
▶ 1:35:00From the creation of the National Postal Service to the discoveries that led to the inter internet, the federal government has a long history of embracing new technology to better deliver for our constituents.
▶ 1:35:17But our north star must always be service to the American people, not tax breaks for billionaires or backroom deals to benefit the richest man in the world at public expense.
▶ 1:35:33As we discuss the use of artificial intelligence in government, we must have people at the center of the conversation, including the people we represent and federal workers who who serve our country. AI is a tool that can empower our public servants, but it is not a substitute for passionate and committed federal workers.
▶ 1:36:01Miss Miller, can AI alone replace federal workers? Absolutely not. No. The implementation of AI, it's very important when we think about building AI tools that we're building them with the people that we need that that that will use them. AI uh is talked about a lot as something that's going to replace people.
▶ 1:36:23Um I'm I'm a strong advocate in using AI to automate routine processes and repeatable processes and free up people to do more um high level highskilled work. And so I don't I absolutely do not believe that AI should be doing the work of the public servants. I believe that AI should augment that work and that we should work with public service as we put in place AI tools. Thank you.
▶ 1:36:50Um Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency has uh gutted so much of the federal workforce, firing tens of thousands of people under the guise of greater efficiency. But Americans know better. They see the negative impacts every day.
▶ 1:37:11As a direct result of the interference with social security administrations, senior citizens now face 98 million minute wait times to speak with customer service, crowded lobbies at field offices, and being turned away from scheduled appointments because the agency simply does not have enough employees for its mission.
▶ 1:37:39Poor customer service is not efficiency. It is failing to uphold the government's responsibility to our constituents. Now, the Social Security Administration wants to cut an additional 7,000 employees and somehow use AI to handle calls from seniors.
▶ 1:38:00That does not work because I know that when my constituents have a problem with social security, they would rather talk to a person with a computer uh uh talk to a person than a constit a computer program.
▶ 1:38:20The Department of Government Efficiency cuts are wrecking uh havoc on our communities and it will take years to clean up the mess Elon Musk has left behind. Thank you and I yield back. Um thank you. I'll now recognize Miss Fox for five minutes. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman. Um and thanks to our witnesses for being here. Mr.
▶ 1:38:45theor the Trump administrations has expressed a goal for the United States to maintain its dominance in AI. Why is it important for the United States to maintain its dominant position in AI? Uh thank you for the question, Congresswoman. Uh as you've heard here today from several witnesses, we're in a serious race with China and the Chinese Communist Party for AI supremacy globally.
▶ 1:39:09And the broad-based ramifications of who wins that race are significant for our not just our geopolitical security but also our values broadly uh as as a nation and for the world. And so there's a real danger that if we don't get AI policy right as a nation that China will take the lead. Its products will diffuse throughout the world faster. And we're already seeing this. I was testifying earlier this year at a hearing on the so-called Deep Seek moment.
▶ 1:39:33and we saw uh surprised a lot of us including me how advanced these Chinese systems are today and how effective they've been at filling gaps globally that America is not there to fill at the moment. Thanks. I do think the answer is pretty obvious but it was important to get something on the record. Sure. How is the Trump's administration approach to AI differed from the previous Biden administrations? And why is the departure from the Biden administration's AI policy necessary? Mr. Theor?
▶ 1:40:00Well, the the Biden administration approaches was was very voluminous in terms of rulemaking. You know, the obviously executive order, longest in American history on AI, over 110 pages. Um, and a lot of it was very fear-based, unfortunately, and didn't embrace the technology as much as the new Trump administration executive order and and subsequent orders have done. And so, I think there's been a real sea change of approach here in terms of understanding the benefits associated with uh AI technologies broadly. Thank you, Mr.
▶ 1:40:29Shaw, your company's been successful at streamlining certain administrative tasks for businesses in the private sector and helping boost productivity. How do you see AI technologies like those developed by your company being effectively used in the federal government? And what kinds of productivity gains and cost savings could we expect to see? Thank you for the question. Um, you know, to put it in maybe legislative terms, you know, imagine you had an assistant that could summarize the status of a bill.
▶ 1:41:00Perhaps maybe look up a constituent uh problem that you've been tackling uh before a meeting or being able to search all of your notes and your memos about uh various committee hearings and and um and tasks that have been assigned. All these things are things that AI gives us today and the private sector is using this uh quite aggressively to make their own teams more uh more efficient and effective. To your question about sort of what that looks like, you know, there's sort of three categories I like to think about scale.
▶ 1:41:30Broadcom, for example, was able to go from 10,000 employees to 50,000 while keeping the same support staff. So that's another benefit which is you can take the same team and allow them to support a lot more employees in this case but in our case here uh today talking about constituents. I think there's also employee time savings.
▶ 1:41:48Uh the city of Glendale I mentioned did a 500% plus ROI on their investment but that was 3500 hours of savings from the employees themselves that they could apply and use towards other tasks and functions for their constituents. And then of course there's monetary savings which is that if we can do some of this more efficiently that goes back to the US taxpayers goes back into the economy to get spent on further innovation. Thank you very much Miss Miller.
▶ 1:42:16According to the office of management and budget each year taxpayers provide more than 1.2 trillion or nearly 5% of GDP and funding for thousands of programs across the entire government through grants and other financial assistance. With so much taxpayer money spent, it should come as no surprise that besides a very high level accounting, the federal government largely cannot tell whether a particular grant award was used wisely or if it accomplished the stated goals of the grant program.
▶ 1:42:45This committee has worked on legislation such as my bill from 2019, the great act to address the problem. But as we've discovered, there's not enough data available in the proper formats to evaluate whether taxpayer funds given out as grants are being used wisely. How could AI help us solve this problem and make sure that every taxpayer dollar given as a grant is used effectively and for its stated purpose? Thanks for the question. Actually, we did something pretty innovative with my technology company, Tracklight.
▶ 1:43:14we were trying to figure out who one of uh the agencies that we were working with with paid and so we uh got access to minutes um of of board meetings and then we used AI to scrape those minutes and identify vendors and then we we were able to collect hundreds of vendors that this agency was paying that they didn't know they were paying. Now we we can all talk about how insane it is that the agency doesn't know who they're paying which is a serious problem.
▶ 1:43:40But there is ways there are ways that AI can help solve this problem and start to to sort of piece together who these grants are going to. And it's incredibly important for taxpayers to know that information. It would be nice if we could just search things on fireside. Thank you. Yeah. All right. Thank you. And I'll now recognize Mr. Infume for five minutes. Madam Chairwoman, thank you very much. My thanks to the guests who have come today.
▶ 1:44:07Um, one of the things that strikes me about this hearing is that we don't have enough time and uh, we're all trying to get a lot in here. So, I will uh, certainly use the right that members have to submit questions for the record uh, for five business days because there are a number of you, Mr. Shaw in particular, I want to ask some questions of you through that process and uh, uh, Mr. Schneider, your testimony was chilling to say the very least. So hopefully we can talk about that.
▶ 1:44:37Uh but Miss Miller, I'd like to start with you. Much of your work focuses on fraud prevention. And before we get to that, I'd like to go back to something that I heard that was just as chilling. And that was your description of these outdated privacy laws which don't afford any protection whatsoever to what's happening now in 2025 at the rapid pace of this technology and its development.
▶ 1:45:03It's very scary to to believe and to hear quite frankly that we are behind in that because the privacy of Americans is absolutely important. Uh it's just as important as what Miss uh Norton brought up earlier and that is the fact that people who are looking for social security or trying to get Medicaid or trying to figure out SNAP benefits are running into this technology and being run over by it in many instances.
▶ 1:45:30So, can we talk just a minute about these privacy laws which I assume uh were they predate all of this discussion and that there is as I understand not a real determined effort to upgrade them to be able to protect industry and be be able to protect government and individuals. Yeah, thank you Congressman. there.
▶ 1:45:53Um those the privacy act was passed in 1972 which was 52 years ago um almost 53 and um we still have um that's that's still the the the law that governs how we protect privacy today which obviously is exceptionally outdated. Um there are in my opinion um there isn't a lot that can be done through the legal system to protect Americans um personally identifiable information anymore.
▶ 1:46:20I think we just live in an entirely new world now and foreign adversarial nation state actors criminal rings we've all of our all of our data has been monetized is being monetized today 96% of information that's stolen through a data breach is used to monetize by by a threat actor and so because we have such an asymmetric situation when it comes to data government is going to have to get much better about using technology to protect privacy and there are technologies that are in place I'm sure that that some
▶ 1:46:50um from some of the panelists here today are are using in the private sector. Uh we can anonymize data and so we can do things that we can protect that can protect people's privacies and we're going to need to think about this both from a legislative perspective not hamstringing agencies. The privacy act and the computer matching act keep agencies from being able to share data that they desperately need to be able to find these actors and again these actors are foreign adversarial actors. Thank you very very much Mr. Schneider.
▶ 1:47:18Let's go back to your assessment of uh the bigger you are, the bigger target you are, the more data is collected on you and the more harm that will come to you, your community, your agency, your government in this instance. Walk me down that briefly down that street again because you you didn't go into the fact that this is not science fiction. This is happening every day and it's happening to the United States of America.
▶ 1:47:42Well, I mentioned China, the uh the OPM breach from the last decade where China went into OPM and took the data among other things, all the clearance forms of of United States citizens and and you can imagine why they might do that. Might identify who spies are, might look for uh people they can influence. And that is the sort of thing that countries are doing today. I mean, I'm I'm assuming we're doing it to them.
▶ 1:48:08And so this data is very valuable at the government level for a lot of different things. I mentioned two scenarios, mentioned a potential war scenario, potential peace scenario. The more data we have and our data is being collected everywhere and so a lot of data is had by social media companies that know a lot about what we like and who we are and who our friends are and who's important to us. But the data we give government is a different sort of data.
▶ 1:48:37You think about the data that's on the tax return or the data that the Census Bureau collects or the the military data, that's personal on a different level. And countries want that. They're going to want that in aggregate to figure out things about us and they're going to want it individually. And coercion is a lot of lot of depends who you are what coercion means. Thank you. My my time is expired. Madam Chair, thank you very much. Thank you. I'll now recognize Mr. Sessions for five minutes.
▶ 1:49:06Madam Chair, thank you very much. Uh, and good morning to each of the panel members. We appreciate you being here. Long time ago, I spent time at Bell Labs where we were responsible for the network architecture, but also the development of uh of the switch that would be utilized. We set standards and did things to where we had unified way to look at uh how switch operated.
▶ 1:49:33We both know we had salt and vault typhoon whereby our government people learned that the Chinese had been into our cyber through cyber our databases for a long time should have found it didn't find it cost us.
▶ 1:49:52My question really is, and I'm sure every each one of you have an an answer for this, or at least your vision that, all it takes is one node to be compromised. It's like a big fence that goes around. It just takes one loose place. Do does the federal government do we here in Congress need to ask someone?
▶ 1:50:18Do we need to deal with other countries that there's there need to be a standards body that specifically like when I worked at the labs to set what those standards are? How do we avoid with all the things we're doing getting something that happens like that? Again, I'll sir evidently you're you've got your hand on the panel first. I didn't any ideas? I didn't know this was Jeopardy that you had to be quick.
▶ 1:50:46Well, I I Okay, then we can go to you if you want. But uh my point is do you have any ideas on this question? So So we have things I mean this is the job of the NSA, right? This is the we have security organizations in the United States whose job is to protect American data and I think we do actually do a pretty good job and we have problems that a lot of data is in private hands that you know right now if you think about just the defense department there are thousands of networks but there are rules and you know
▶ 1:51:16I think we're doing okay. I don't think we need an international standard. I mean this is very much United States. I mean NATO does things together so there are groups but I would This isn't like a corporate security thing where we need an international standards. Everyone's consistent. The US has US problems. US adversaries and we do have US solutions. We also have battleships and aircraft carriers are out in the middle of places. Anyone else? Thank you, sir. Mr.
▶ 1:51:47Yeah, I think you know what we've seen in especially in cyber security, the the NIST has created standards there that became adopted by a majority of the industry. And I think when it comes to AI and protecting data, uh coming from the lens of a startup from a young company, uh we've looked at the new standards that they have around AI and they're actually pretty good and they do provide for a lot of recommendations that we actually follow.
▶ 1:52:11And then furthermore, you know, going through the fed ramp process, while I found it to be very expensive, there was a lot of amazing sort of things that they recommended in terms of infrastructure, software, process, and procedures that allow us to really make sure that the data is secured.
▶ 1:52:29And so I think that if we can have more of these types of frameworks, more of a lighter touch, it'll allow us to continue to innovate fast but still give us all a true north of where we should take things in terms of our infrastructure and our processes. Sir, sir, I would say three things. Number one, uh just to follow on Mr. Shaw's point, I think NIST is well positioned for this.
▶ 1:52:50I think the remissioning of the safety institute by the department of commerce two days ago that will focus on really building the standards across our federal government and how they use AI is a step forward. Also looking at you know open-source models coming from countries of concern specifically China and what kind of a risk they possess in our ecosystem. I think that's the right step to do it at the allies and partners levels.
▶ 1:53:12As I mentioned in my opening remarks, the five I alliance really provides us with a stepping stone of you know coming with some common standards among our five allied partners and then start bringing other countries under the fold. And the third piece as Mr. Shri mentioned here earlier uh what can we do on the offensive side so our adversary doesn't get a hold of our data they don't use it against us and then actually we are uh we put them on the back foot instead of letting them you know really attack us on a daily and hourly basis.
▶ 1:53:42Good. Anyone else? Just very briefly, sir. Um, I just want to put in a good word for what the Trump administration's been doing with its recent executive orders and OMB guidance on this front, which has been to provide not only a framework for expanding the use of AI throughout government, but also getting more serious about security vulnerabilities and other types of concerns. And recent OMB guidances like uh M25-21 and 22 basically try to address these concerns you're raising. Great. Thank you. I appreciate the panel very much, Madam Chair. I yield back. Thank you. I'll now recognize Miss Brown for 5 minutes.
▶ 1:54:12Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm glad this committee is finally turning its attention to the federal government's use of artificial intelligence because under President Trump, AI isn't being used to serve the people. It's being abused to serve the powerful. Dolge was a reckless, unregulated, and unethical failure. And I wouldn't be surprised if some of my colleagues on the other side quietly agree now that Elon Musk is out here trashing their one big ugly bill.
▶ 1:54:41So let's be clear about how we got here. Musk and his cronies were handed the keys to our government's data. Let loose to sidestep security safeguards, strip away federal jobs, and exploit Americans personal information unchecked and unaccountable. They used AI as a blunt force tool to slash thousands of federal jobs and gut billions in government spending with no transparency or regard for the human cost. But that's not even the most dangerous part.
▶ 1:55:10Doge has launched an unprecedented power grab over Americans personal data. Earlier this year, reports surfaced that a Dole staffer with no credentials and no clearance reportedly accessed Americans personal information and shared private data with third parties. I co-led a letter with reps Treyan and Delben demanding an investigation. And it might not come as a surprise that we're still waiting for answers. And we now know this wasn't a one-off.
▶ 1:55:40Whistleblowers have revealed that Dolge is actively building a master database, a centralized system combining sensitive data from across federal and state agencies that includes Americans medical records, their credit card numbers, their medical claims, their student debts, and much, much more. To build it, the administration has turned to Palentier, the surveillance firm funded and founded by Republican mega donor Peter Teal.
▶ 1:56:08And this massive trove of personal information is being built with no oversight, no security guarantees, and no guard rails. Here's why every American should be alarmed. In the wrong hands, this database could be weaponized to target political enemies, suppress dissent, or survey the public. And even in the best case scenario, a breach could expose millions to identity theft, blackmail, or worse.
▶ 1:56:36What's most disturbing is how much we still don't know. But what we do know raises serious concerns about violations of the Privacy Act, FSMA, and Egovernment Act. This committee must keep investigating because we cannot allow AI to become a weapon of surveillance for for surveillance, exploitation, and the dismantling of public institutions. So, Mr.
▶ 1:57:01Shire, how could Americans how should Americans feel knowing that Doge is pulling together their most sensitive personal data to train AI without clear safeguards, oversight or consent? And what protections are in place to keep that data from being misused or exposed? Well, we do have a lot of laws in place. We have laws protecting the data. We have laws uh prescribing how it is used, how it is shared, and that's what's being bypassed.
▶ 1:57:26So, it really is more a matter of enforcing the laws we have on the books than writing new laws. I don't think there's I don't think we have a need to to do anything because of AI because these problems with data sharing, the security risks have been with us for for decades and we do have laws. We do have rules and they're being bypassed. So, let me ask you this. Given DOA's reported practice of bypassing security protocols and exporting sensitive data to less secure environments, how serious is the national security risk?
▶ 1:57:57And are we making it easier for foreign adversary hackers to access government systems and Americans personal information? I mean, we are we knew from the first weeks that some of the things Doers was doing was bypassing security protocols. So, and removing audit trails. I mean, basically eliminating the security mechanisms we have in place to protect the data. We've had one example of a Russian actor going in after a Doge employee using their credentials and that's the one we know about. These countries are not stupid.
▶ 1:58:26They know how to do espionage. They've been doing it for decades. And so I think I said in my remarks, we have to assume that all of this data has been exfiltrated by our enemies. I would be very concerned. Now it depends on who you are. The more powerful you are, the more concerned you are because the more leverage can be leveraged against you. Thank you. Let me be clear. Artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies can offer real benefits, but only when developed responsibly and with clear guard rails that protect the American people.
▶ 1:58:56So, I stand ready to work with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who are serious about securing our nation's cyber security, safely deploying AI within the federal government, and ensuring that Americans data remains safe. And with that, m Madam Chairwoman, I yield back. Thank you. I'll now recognize Mr. begs for 5 minutes. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank the panelists for being here today. Um Mr.
▶ 1:59:20Shaw, in your written testimony, uh you describe how um various communities, counties, cities, and two of them in Arizona, Scottsdale and Glendale are actually using um AI perhaps becoming a hub of AI anyway, using it uh in to become more efficient. Can you expand on that for us? tell us tell us what what they're doing and then the guide guidelines and guide or guard rails that they have in place. Yeah, it's a great question.
▶ 1:59:47So, you know, in terms of the uh cities and counties that have started to adopt this technology, they're using it to make their employees more effective. What does that mean? That means that they can selfserve a lot more use cases than they would have otherwise. They can find information. They can uh troubleshoot issues that they might be having with it or even an HR uh situation or use case. They can they can submit um performance reviews.
▶ 2:00:12They can do a variety of tasks that were otherwise very manual and very slow and required a lot of coordination amongst folks. And so this, you know, uh, as I was mentioning earlier, um, City of Glendale in Arizona is saving their employees 3,500 hours now, um, each each month, being able to now do more with those same team members to support the employees or the constituents of their of their county.
▶ 2:00:40And so I think that we see this across the private sector. Uh we've seen people use this technology to enable more employees um to do uh greater levels of work and greater levels of output uh while still sort of maintaining all the privacy and the security that's required in any of those environments. Uh thanks for that. Now Mr. Schneider was talking about the laws that have been placed to protect privacy rights.
▶ 2:01:06um and and they've been in place for a long time largely ignored u from both parties if quite frankly if you in my in my opinion but but what I want to get to is something that Mr.
▶ 2:01:21uh Badra Tardi said when you started talking about the five eyes community um and I just came from another hearing where we one of the issues that we're having is that uh pursuant to the cloud act the UK is trying to get back door hacks into Apple and uh they're claiming that they have some kind of robust privacy protection there but the reality is they won't disclose what that robust privacy protection is and they're keeping the entire process
▶ 2:01:51um closed, obscured. And so I'm curious about how we can fully work with the Five Eyes community in the development of AI and yet protect the the fundamental rights of American citizens. And so I'm going to ask you that question. Thank you, sir. Great question.
▶ 2:02:13Um we have created the five eye community during the cold war because one of the ways we could share more and fast and be ahead of what Soviet Union was doing was you know being able to share with our allies and partners. I think there needs to be a starting point in how we confront China today. I don't think we can confront China alone without bringing you know our closest allies under the fold. The speed and scale of how China adopts and uses AI for national security purposes is really breathtaking.
▶ 2:02:42So my point is we should start with a community of the most trusted allies and partners that we So, so my question is though if when when you have the essentially the abuse of of rights that we're seeing through the abuse of the the agreement the cloud agreement between US and UK can you fully trust the five eyes to to work together on this and that's yeah understand concern I think we have to work really closely with them to remove obstacles
▶ 2:03:13because I think the challenge we face ahead of us is that if we don't find a common language anguage and build common security protocols. I think we would have a different world by the end of this decade. You know, a world in which CCP will probably have access to all our data. The entire global infrastructure will depend on the CCP and the companies subsidized by Chinese. So, we have to find a ways to remove these obstacles with our closest I don't disagree with that.
▶ 2:03:37It's just um we need to make changes right now and we're not making changes fast enough and we're not implementing anything fast enough. So, um, I I'm going to ask unanimous consent to enter into the record the bill text from a new Arizona law passed earlier this month to close dangerous loophole that allowed predatories predators to use AI and digital eding tools to create child sexual abuse material that appears but real but depicts no actual child.
▶ 2:04:05It was uh HP2678 sponsored by House Republican Majority Whip Julie Willoughby and it updates state law to ensure AI generated and digitally altered images that are indistinguishable from real minors carry the same criminal penalties as those involving actual children's. I'd like to submit. No objection. I also ask for unanimous consent to enter into the record an article discussing how my home state of Arizona is taking steps to allow AI to flourish, showcasing that that states can handle AI reggg uh regulation responsibly and reap the economic benefits.
▶ 2:04:35No objection. Thank All right. I'll now recognize Miss Tansbury for five minutes. All right. Good morning everyone. Thank you so much for being here and I want to say thank you to the entire panel for your recommendations this morning. Uh my background is actually in the sciences and I've worked a lot of my career. I'm actually I've worked on natural and earth sciences most my career including on big data and modeling.
▶ 2:05:00So I do appreciate much of what um the recommendations are that have come from our experts. But I'm especially grateful that you're here Mr. theory because when the huge abomination of a bill, I'll call it, uh, came down the pike, I my eye actually caught the specific language and funding appropriation in the bill that you referenced in your testimony.
▶ 2:05:25And I think many of us were confused about where it came from, what its intent is, and this is the first time I've had the opportunity to actually ask some questions. So, I'm glad you're here. And as I understand it from my uh look into your background that you're you've actually been directly involved in developing this language and request. Is that correct? Not not that language. I've written about moratoria in in the past though going back to the 1990s when I work with Congress on the uh internet tax freedom act. Got it. Okay.
▶ 2:05:56Um, so you mentioned that uh part of why this deregulation language is in here that would preempt state and local laws regarding the um regulation of AI systems is in part because of this $500 million request that's in the bill. Um, can you help us understand what would that $500 million be used to do specifically?
▶ 2:06:20Uh going back to the bipartisan house AI task force report from last December, there was a major section that led off the report about the need for government modernization of IT. Just some specifics. Uh so so specifically at the Department of Commerce, there's a need to actually improve how various uh programs function there, including new ones that have just been created. Just some specifics like what kind of systems would be built with this $500 million? Well, I don't know exactly. I I don't know the answer to that, Congresswoman. I'm sorry. I don't know specifically what Congress will use that money for going forward.
▶ 2:06:50Do you know where this request came from? Uh you'd have to ask the House Energy and Commerce Committee specifically who put the bill forward uh that language forward in the U in the Do you know what companies would benefit from this language? No, but I do know that there is a broad need for many different types of vendors and services to be utilized by the federal government, not just this would likely go to private contracts. Correct. It would go to many private contracts certainly. Yeah.
▶ 2:07:14And so and some of the leading contractors who do work in this area that already have government contracts are are um companies like Palunteer. Correct. Uh I believe that's one of many, but there's many other vendors of IT services and AI. So correct. Yes. Um and I heard you argue just a few moments ago when Mr. Higgins was asking you about this preeemption language that it was needed because there would be integration of data from state and local entities.
▶ 2:07:42And it's my understanding, I think others have kind of alluded to this, that right now the Trump administration is working on creating some sort of master database that brings together data from multiple different sources um across state lines.
▶ 2:07:56And in fact, there was a request that went out to um the states asking for data about SNAP beneficiaries because uh my understanding is Homeland Security is interested in integrating data uh for immigration enforcement purposes. So they would like to integrate data um using the census data that they hacked and exfiltrated and downloaded. They'd like to integrate data with the immigration uh databases that they have.
▶ 2:08:26And now they're asking states to send data that falls under state jurisdiction to integrate for immigration enforcement. And you know, you can call it whatever you want. I've heard folks say this is not a master database, but it absolutely is.
▶ 2:08:41And we know that the Trump administration is trying to take American data and hire private companies like Palunteer um to create means to use American data for their own policy ends, including endangering the lives of Americans. So um I think that one of the reasons why folks are reacting so strongly to this language that's in this bill is because it's so extreme.
▶ 2:09:10And yesterday I heard Marjorie Taylor Green. I was standing on the floor while she gave a speech on this very language that's in this bill that would literally say that states and localities could not enforce their own data rules or AI. Um it preempts federalism. It preempts state law. It would prevent states from protecting their own citizens. And you know, it's rare these days that we have bipartisan agreement, but I agree with literally everything that Marjgerie Taylor Green said on the floor yesterday. This is dangerous.
▶ 2:09:40It could endanger American lives and we cannot allow this language to get through. And with that, I yield back. Thank you. And I'll recognize Mr. Perry for 5 minutes. Thank you, Madam Chair, and ladies and gentlemen, thanks for making the trip and being here. I'm not sure what questions I have for you, but I do want to make everybody aware of some things that I am aware of.
▶ 2:10:01Um, I'm going to refer directly to a safety an AI safety firm named Palisad Research and another one named Apollo Research and talk about things like the fact that the Chinese Communist Party likes to pollute the I don't know the uh the the available information in the world with all kinds of things that support the Communist Party of China's view of the world and not the free worlds.
▶ 2:10:30And and with that having been said, I suspect that all of you are aware of the times that the when the AI has been when various AI has been tested. I'll give you a couple names. Codeex Mini, Open AI, model 03, open AI, model 04, and other ones.
▶ 2:10:51the the open a or the correction the AI has chosen on occasion to further its goals as opposed to the goals of the people that wrote the code and on occasion um how about the uh the instance where anthropics claude for model attempted to blackmail the people it believed were trying to shut it down and then it would ignore and other ones would ignore shutdown commands even when told in advance that
▶ 2:11:22shutdown commands were coming and went as far as to rewrite itself and preserve itself on a different server to avoid the commands of the humans in charge of it. Now that might seem I'm that might seem like the view of a lite but I mean I've got pages and of AI deliberately disabling disabling various developer installed oversight me mechanisms shutdown commands being
▶ 2:11:53uh ignored replicating itself preserving itself without the user even knowing. Now, let me be clear. I think that the United States of America has to win the race and be preeminent in AI.
▶ 2:12:09But I also think while I sit on the oversight committee that knowing these things are occurring during tests that us encouraging as a committee or as a Congress, the use of these systems in places like nuclear security or national security without having these pretty obvious things worked out is dangerous.
▶ 2:12:35like at a minimum like is almost I can't even I can't even believe we're having the conversation. Like how in the hell are we in here telling everybody that we've got to incorporate this into the federal government, state government, all levels of government, including like national defense, nuclear security when we know these things are occurring. And I don't know which one of you to ask. You all seem to be all for AI and I get it's your vocation, your passion, etc.
▶ 2:13:03But we got we got a duty here on this committee and and in this Congress to make sure that the right thing happens. And you know, humans, Americans are supposed to be in charge of the government, not some machine that learned from another machine that picked up data that was polluted with Chinese propaganda and is going to like push the button for us. Miss Miller, you seem interested. I got a minute left. What do you got?
▶ 2:13:30Well, there this is a real concern and GAO and other um standard setting entities have been really pushing for responsible AI frameworks and this is one of those reasons why when we talk about AI you can get a bunch of people in a room that are like go go lean in you know do more adoption faster faster but it's so important to think about these safeguards and how important they are responsible AI is incredibly important when we're dealing with national security information and American citizens information that could things that could that threaten
▶ 2:14:00the actual, you know, safety and security of of American citizens. And so it's incredibly important that we we are slow and deliberate enough and that is one of the reasons why GAO and others have put out these frameworks and it's really important. I agree with you as this over. So are you saying that the frameworks deal adequately with these things or am I what am I missing? Well, I'm saying that if they're considered and carefully rolled out then those those concerns will be at least taken into consideration.
▶ 2:14:28I do think there's a lot of risk in AI and we should I agree with you consider where we want to apply this and where we want to. So ma'am I have a little bit of time left and I ju I just want to say this I I think for me it it's beyond consideration like before we hand this thing the nuclear codes I don't want it to be considered.
▶ 2:14:45I want to know the damn stuff is right, not polluted with Chinese communist uh uh uh facts or their alleged version of the facts and that the thing's not going to avoid the humans and avoid uh you know detection and all that stuff. Madam Chair, I would like to enter into the record or request that be entered into the record Apollo uh Apollo Research's report titled Frontier Models Are Capable of Incontext Scheming published on January 16th, 2025.
▶ 2:15:15And I ask that be No objection. Thank you. I Thank you. I'll recognize Miss Randall for five minutes. Thank you, Madam Chair. Um and thank you to our witnesses today for being here maybe longer than you even Um you know, m Mr.
▶ 2:15:32Perry mentioned some of the important reasons that AI use in the federal government is responsible for the lives and livelihoods of so many more individuals than, you know, one of us asking chat GPT a question, you know, for our own purposes.
▶ 2:15:53Um, and we've seen some examples uh of potential uh federal government uses of um AI that have gone wrong. Mr.
▶ 2:16:07Schneider, you know, Elon Elon Musk and Doge have tried to throw AI at problems throughout the government with no regard to Americans privacy, safety, and security, no regard to the 27,000 federal employees who I represent.
▶ 2:16:26um and to uh you know I don't seem to be able to parse uh the difference between um gender research and specifying that female flies must be used in NIH research studies.
▶ 2:16:43Um can you discuss why uh the need for some of those higher standards in um you know some uh a higher standard of AI use uh framework in situations like that and what some of the pitfalls are of not um a higher standard for AI use in government than the private industry. I'm not sure it's government versus private industry.
▶ 2:17:11I mean we would probably might expect the same standards in banking right in or in uh in university admissions right there are going to be these instances where the decisions made are important enough that we have rules and laws prescribing how they can be made and it's really a matter of making sure the AI is suitable for the task being able to audit what the AI is doing correct for mistakes and In some
▶ 2:17:42ways, it's replacing a humans make mistakes all the time. And we as a society has had thousands of years dealing with human mistakes from like double entry bookkeeping to checklists of surgical equipment, make sure they're not left in bodies. We know when a human makes a mistake, how to deal with it. To the extent that AI makes human mistakes, we're covered. But AI makes different sorts of mistakes. So a lot of our systems for dealing with them just don't work.
▶ 2:18:10So when I think about an AI being used something important like a benefits administration, it's going to be how it's used. So I'm going to make this up like we'll have the AI do the work, but it's only allowed to say easy yeses. Can't say no, just say yes. Everything it does is reviewed and all the nos, anything that's hard, humans review. We can watch the AI get better or worse.
▶ 2:18:35we might give more responsibility but again with a lot of audit it's really a matter of replacing versus augmenting one of the early questions was about AI and procurement so I can think of two things where an AI is a negotiating assistant assisting a human in negotiating a Walmart does this right now like they use AI is they have to buy a gazillion things to help with that but the humans are in charge and also possibly using AI for for auditing there's a really interesting work done on using AI
▶ 2:19:05to figure out which uh slaughter houses human a inspectors should visit. Right? There are a lot out there. We can pick at random or we can have some algorithm. Again, the AI is not making the decision. The human is. So, it really is really thinking very carefully about how the AI and human work together where we can get the benefits of the AI without losing control. I Mr.
▶ 2:19:30Perry talked about that's really important but still getting the benefits of the speed or the scale that AI provides. Thank you. You know, I think that that is a a a key difference that um you know, many of my neighbors and constituents are talking about use technological tools for more information, for data gathering, for the ability to distill things.
▶ 2:19:53But when we're talking about say the life and death of individuals who depend on NIH funded research or um you know decisions that have to do with termination of individuals because maybe they wrote an email that says a word that people don't like in it. Um you know this becomes really dangerous and has real human impact.
▶ 2:20:18So putting in safeguards so that Doge doesn't continue to make uh mistakes that are unable to be quickly corrected and that have real long-term um impacts I think is very important for us as an oversight committee to keep on top of. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you. And I'll recognize Mr. Burles for five minutes.
▶ 2:20:39Thank you, Madam Chair, for holding this very critical hearing on the federal government in the age of artificial intelligence as we explore the AI's ability to transform this economy and the potential that it has to enhance federal program efficiency, combat fraud, and deliver better services to the American people. We must address a fundamental challenge to this, and that is our federal procurement system.
▶ 2:21:08Our current system is riddled with barriers, lengthy certification processes, complex reseller networks, and multi-year contract vehicles that prevent agencies from accessing innovations or AI solutions, particularly from smaller companies. This procurement challenge not only hinders efficiency, but also threatens America's global leadership in AI.
▶ 2:21:35In the last Congress, the 118th Congress, my bill, the FIT Procurement Act, was reported favorably out of this committee and then successfully passed the House with bipartisan support last year. I will be introducing the Fit Procurement Act again shortly. But let me point out that my bill directly tackles our outdated federal procurement system.
▶ 2:22:00This act streamlines federal acquisition to empower agencies to further acquire cutting edge commercial technologies like AI. It does this by simply raising the simplified acquisition threshold from 250,000 to 500,000, increasing the micro purchase threshold from 10K to 25K, and allowing advanced payments for subscription-based software, which is what we see so readily today that the federal government is not able to take advantage of.
▶ 2:22:30With unanimous bipartisan support in the last Congress, this act is a proven common sense reform to modernize government, save taxpayer dollars, and reposition the United States as a continued leader in the AIdriven future. And I look forward to hearing from our witnesses about that. And so, let me get begin. Mrs. Miller, in your testimony, you discuss why agencies should buy commercial technology rather than build custom code.
▶ 2:22:59As someone who was an in-house custom coder, I couldn't agree with you more. Um, could you follow up and elaborate on that? Yeah, sure. Well, the point I was making in my testimony about that was that um, it creates technical debt when you're creating um, your code yourself. And because AI is moving so quickly, frequently it'll be obsolete soon after it's built. And so, it makes sense to to contract with vendors who have more updated tools.
▶ 2:23:23Um I would just add that the the the bill that you're that you're just that you're referring to given my my own small company's challenges um getting access to um small pilot projects and proofs of concept um given those those very low thresholds this would be very beneficial to small innovative technology companies. That's thank you you I don't have to now ask my follow-up question. Um, is it true that um, AI can be used to detect fraud in in the grant process effectively?
▶ 2:23:53Yeah, there's so many great use cases for AI in the fraud space when it comes to grants. We can scan through information using open- source intelligence. AI models, large language models can sort that information incredibly quickly within seconds and spot anomalies humans would not be able to spot. Even if we were a lot of times what is happening today are are grant processors or pulling up Google and opening up different different screens and looking for things on different on different sites.
▶ 2:24:20Sometimes they have access to open source intelligence tools, but they're still manually checking for that. AI makes that incredibly quick. Thank you. Mr. Shaw, you've highlighted the federal government's procurement problem in their process.
▶ 2:24:33Um, based on your experience, direct experience, do you believe that changes to the procurement process allowing agencies to pilot products like yours before going enterprisewide would allow smaller companies like you to better compete for Yes, we we believe that strongly. I think there's a variety of ways to do that. One, creating more POC type programs. You know, a good example is the uh I think it's called the investment horizon pilot program that the office of the CIO of the Navy has implemented.
▶ 2:25:03But the challenge is every agency seems to have their own set of ways that they procure um new technologies. So to the extent that we can help to normalize that will help us also navigate you know for example through the fed rampant process that I've described of the 8.5 million 600,000 I spent on consultants to help me figure out the process just to get certified. Yeah. So so it's like you know I couldn't have spent that on maybe more innovation or other other areas.
▶ 2:25:32So I think that if you have innovator programs or ways for us to start with other agencies that are less security focused will will be a big help. Is it safe to say the federal government is a pain in the ass client? It is a it is a complex web and uh if you ever want to do a secret shopper with me one day and you can sort of watch how this plays out, I'd be very happy to show you what it looks like. I yield back. All right. Now, I will now recognize Mr. Garcia for 5 minutes. Uh thank you, Madam Chairwoman. Uh thank you to our witnesses for being here today.
▶ 2:26:01I want to just start by uh noting that we know that certainly AI can be an important tool for our federal government, for our federal workforce, that we always want to make sure that we're centering those that are working in our government and uplift the work that our federal workers do every single day. Um but we know that AI can navigate and help government become more efficient and intuitive in many cases. I think we should be honest about that. It can also help constituents get services faster. I've seen this happen at the local level.
▶ 2:26:28Um, I've seen it happen, of course, and now happening at the state level and here in Congress as well. We also know that many agencies uh just need to move more quickly, be more efficient, and AI can be a tool when you respect the federal workforce and work with the federal workforce on how we make these these implementations happen. AI can also be used, of course, on issues around red tape. I saw this happen is seeing happening in cities across the United States. And we can analyze data better, better, and faster.
▶ 2:26:54Uh we can also work to empower federal workforce in ways that they can use AI to help them do their jobs. And I think that's an important piece of this. It's also clear though that AI can be incredibly dangerous, incredibly disruptive, and certainly without guard rails can cause real harm to the American public and to the work that we're all trying to do. Now, deployment of course is going to take investments in work. But I do have some serious concerns about how AI is used and it's particularly in this administration.
▶ 2:27:21And I want to talk about one of them which I think is is is actually really really important. So this of course is uh Robert Kennedy Jr. Someone who I consider to be an extreme antivaxer. I believe for him to be a conspiracy theorist and certainly has no business being the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Now take one step back. We just went through a pandemic where 1.3 million Americans lost their lives or businesses were shut down across the country. Uh where healthc care was brought to the forefront of the public consciousness.
▶ 2:27:51And we know how important getting real medical vaccine testing information is to the medical to to to the to the American public. And right now we're dealing with measles outbreaks in Texas and other places. Information needs to be peer-reviewed, fact checked, uh, and done in a way that is is responsible. But here, of course, we know that there was recently a make America healthy report that was put out by RFK Jr. and HHS. And I g I'm gonna include in this in these in the article just this quote.
▶ 2:28:19There were dozens of errors, including broken links, wrong issue numbers, and missing or incorrect authors. Some studies were mis were misstated to back up the report's conclusions, or more damningly, didn't exist at all. At least seven of the cited sources were entirely fictitious. What we do know from many folks that have read this report is it appears that AI played a role in developing a report about the public health of Americans. This is something that we should be incredibly concerned with.
▶ 2:28:49And let's be clear, RFK Jr. has a long history already of dangerous unscientific beliefs. He said 5G and Wi-Fi cause brain damage. He said that people don't that you don't believe that HIV causes AIDS. He said that water can make you transgender. These are very concerning positions.
▶ 2:29:05And the fact that he puts out this report and HHS, which has been long respected as an important agency, puts out a report that is full of AI errors and AI generated content should concern every member of Congress on both sides of the aisle. This is incredibly devastating when you on top of that look at all the cuts that he's making to NIH and other and other uh health agencies across the United States. And so this is for me very concerning and it should be for all of us.
▶ 2:29:33Uh, Professor Snyder, I want to just Is it fair to say that these kind of errors in important government documents and health reports that could be due to AI are concerning to us and we should be concerned about? They are concerning, but put the blame where it belongs. I mean, maybe the AI is not suitable for the task or maybe the human who used the AI didn't like check the work and that would have been true if the human tasked an intern.
▶ 2:29:59I mean, so it's really a matter of what's the process by which by whatever gives you your first draft, do you look at it and make sure it's correct. We've seen the same problem with attorneys submitting uh briefs into courts that have fake precedents. I mean, yes, the AI made the mistake, but it's the human who puts their name to it who says this is correct. They're the ones responsible. I teach this stuff. I tell my students to use AI, but you're responsible for plagiarism. You're responsible for accuracy.
▶ 2:30:29Thank you completely and sir I I I also spent 10 years in the classroom teaching as well and um it's really weird now and um and so I I I same and I think that um the idea that we're now seeing so much AI generated uh content um produced in our in our universities is a different topic but let me just conclude with this I think I want to your point is exactly right AI can be a tool but there has to be the human element the workforce has to be a part of it has to be a responsible user of AI and so that we don't end up with medical reports that
▶ 2:30:59are false. And with that, I yield back. Thank you. Thank you. I'll now recognize Mr. Growthman for five minutes. Thank you. Uh I'll start with Miss Miller. Uh in your testimony in order the government loses more than a half a million dollars to fraud every year. Given that astonishing amount, what can the federal government learn from the private sector? Because we know the private sector wouldn't put up with that, right? Yeah. It's a half a trillion and uh yeah it is an astounding amount.
▶ 2:31:29Um what we what we can learn from the private sector is and and this I I frequently say this when people ask me this question you know a bank invests in fraudrevention technology for because they they know that they're going to save more money with that investment than they are going to spend on the tool. A private sector company would never spend money on something. It wasn't going to have a better return on investment. in the government because fraud is deceptive and we don't see it. We don't invest in anything to try to stop it.
▶ 2:31:57And so it's this sort of happy uh sort of story that agency leaders can tell them because they don't go looking for fraud. They don't find it. And then they don't have to invest in technology to prevent it. And so then you have GAO coming out and saying, "Hey, we're actually losing half a trillion a year or more. I believe it's more to fraud." And the agencies are not being held accountable. I'll give you a kind of a related question. Uh obviously the answer is, you know, we're going to build more technology and blah blah blah.
▶ 2:32:25Uh we learned from Doge a little bit about the work ethic of some of the federal employees. Uh as we spend more money somewhere to stop this fraud, um do you think it should better be spent on hiring new government employees or maybe hiring out to somebody else who can try to detect this fraud? Well, I I wouldn't think I I don't think that government employees themselves have the tools to be able to find this fraud.
▶ 2:32:54So whether you hired more government employees or whether you contracted it out, I still think that there's such a lack of focus on it. Um I do think that concerted investment, whether that's in people or technology or both, it really is going to need both will be needed if we're going if we really want to move the needle on this. Okay. Do do you feel though that the bulk of the work is going to have to be done by contracting out to somebody or other? Do I?
▶ 2:33:19Well, I mean, I think generally speaking, the the federal workforce doesn't have the skill sets that they need to be able to find fraud and we should be skilling them up or we should be contracting it out. Yes. Okay. What's preventing the federal government from implementing similar AI practices that that they have in the private sector? uh a willingness to pretend that it's not happening because all that mostly most agencies are more focused on getting money out the door and that is the goal.
▶ 2:33:48Get the money out the door quickly and then take a victory lap because you spent the money and not recognizing that there are people getting that money who are, you know, foreign state actors and criminal rings. Um but again, because it's underground, because it's not seen, we don't talk about it. We talk about it in these hearings, but we rarely talk about it and the public isn't aware. Yeah. I guess part of the lesson should be the less the government does the better because they'll always screw it up, right? That that's what one of the lessons should be. Um, now we'll go to Mr.
▶ 2:34:19uh the on the first day of office, President Trump rescended Biden's executive order on AI. Could you describe some of the damaging aspects of uh President Biden's executive order? Well, unfortunately, that executive order sought to do a lot of things that Congress should have been doing, Congressman, and really did not wait for Congress to take the lead on on the questions of AI governance more broadly.
▶ 2:34:42Some of the best practices that were there for agencies to follow and uh some of the things that were recommended in terms of uh AI officers were fine. And Mr. President Trump has continued those practices in his executive order that replaced the Trump uh the Biden executive order. But I think generally speaking at a high level, I think the Biden administration's executive order was just very fear-based and treated AI as more like a curse to be avoided than an opportunity to be embraced. Okay.
▶ 2:35:08In your testimony, you cited a study that stated uh utilizing AI systems would allow the federal government to unleash a productivity windfall for the US government worth up to 532 billion annually. Not 531, not 533, 532. Can you describe what kind of productivity gains AI could unlock in the federal government and where the big savings is going to come? Yeah, they're really twofold.
▶ 2:35:34As that report was noting, there are very specific types of targeted reform and and and oversight efforts that AI can help with to improve, you know, paperwork reduction, procedural uh issues, better administration of government, and then there's more broad-based productivity enhancements associated with AI itself and its use not only in the public but private sector uh that can ultimately benefit government uh administration.
▶ 2:35:55Could you tell me which agencies you think would most benefit or when you talk about I don't know how you came up with 532 but is there any big agency you grab 200 billion what are the big yeah well a lot of lot of federal agencies could benefit from more efficient uh operations obviously department of defense is one of them but right now uh important things being done at state and DHS and others just to approve paperwork on things like immigration issues or paperwork issues foyer requests and so on thank you very helpful
▶ 2:36:25I will now recognize Mr. Kana for five minutes. Thank you, Madam Chair. Appreciate the testimony. Mr. Sha, of course, uh you have been such a successful entrepreneur and leader in Silicon Valley. Appreciate your uh being here. So, I'll answer my uh first question uh to you.
▶ 2:36:45uh how do you think uh AI uh can help particularly government employees uh do uh better and be more effective in in in their work. Yeah, thank you.
▶ 2:37:01um you know the see things that we're seeing in the private sector uh today with large organizations like Honeywell and like you know North of Grumman or and the likes they're benefiting from AI by making their employees be able to selfs serve get information that they're looking for and take actions across a variety of systems you know on any given day an employee might have to swivel their chair 17 times to use different tools and that becomes a very wasteful
▶ 2:37:32uh portion of their day, sometimes many hours. And so to the extent that we can start to do that for federal workers uh for all folks um who work for this government I think we're going to see some benefits benefits that will allow them to troubleshoot to have better IT uh benefits that will acrue to them from an HR perspective in terms of uh getting the information they need making the changes the benefit selections that go into that and also be
▶ 2:38:02able to work across different systems. systems without having to be an expert. I think one of the things that you all have pointed out, there's hundreds of enterprise systems inside the government and you may only touch it once a year, twice a year.
▶ 2:38:16And so if you can use AI as the overlay, kind of that front door, what you'll see is your staff and all the members of the federal government be able to navigate these systems uh which can be very complex very easily using the most intuitive interface in the world which is which is language and conversation.
▶ 2:38:35Um so when it comes to that you know we've seen uh companies and in our sort of world of private sector um be able to reclaim uh top five pharmaceutical was able to reclaim 75,000 hours of employee productivity by uh deploying uh this kind of AI across 44 languages. uh we've had a Fortune 500 aerospace manufacturer reclaim 75% of its support budget uh to be able to uh bring in uh technologies and leverage.
▶ 2:39:05So I think that you're going to see both happier employees and better outcomes uh while also uh making the government more And this is uh for uh anyone on the panel.
▶ 2:39:19How would you address people's concerns about AI displacing jobs uh uh something that will lead to layoffs or uh people uh not being able to to I'm happy to start. I think it's going to happen and it's not going to be the jobs we think. It's going to be like low-level lawyers and that's that's going to be hard. I mean because you think about a lot of these professions are apprentice professions and where do the senior partners come from?
▶ 2:39:48If the low level lawyers or low level doctors are being replaced by AI something society has to think about whether there'll be new jobs in all previous revolutions there have been new jobs to replace old jobs this might be different it's why you see a lot of talk about uh AGI sorry about universal basic income UBI like is this going to be different where we need to figure out how to give people the ability to to survive and we don't know we don't know a lot of these things so those are very real fears and I we as society
▶ 2:40:19should think about them before they happen. We're not good at that, but we should. Go ahead, Congressman. Just briefly, I just point out that uh there's been a lot of government reports on this issue and a lot of efforts about government retraining and so on and so forth. It's very hard to have a crystal ball to predict the jobs and skills that are needed in the future. But I'll just point out that just 10 years ago, everyone was predicting a whole bunch of jobs that would be dislocated. The most famous one and number one was going to be radiologists.
▶ 2:40:42And just a couple weeks ago, the New York Times ran a piece that basically say there's more radiologists than ever, and they're utilizing AI to improve their jobs and free up time to do better things. And that's the story of technological change in sector after sector is that we sometimes don't understand how complex human machine interactions work and actually can change jobs for the better and improve the employment output uh over time. I I agree with being a technology optimist.
▶ 2:41:06I will say though that the unemployment rate for people between the ages of 21 and 29 these days with a college degree 15%. And uh so uh the challenge I think as as Mr. Shar pointed out is how especially at the entry level for people particularly with college degrees how are we going to create these jobs and uh and and how are they going to be able to use the tools of AI to be effective.
▶ 2:41:35But I appreciate uh all of your thinking on this and uh appreciate you being here for your testimony. Thank you. Thank you. I'll now recognize Mr. Donald's for 5 minutes. Uh thank you, Madam Chair. I think it's actually a a good jumping off point from my colleagueu's uh comments about uh potential concerns of displacement.
▶ 2:41:57I I think that, you know, as we've looked at the evolutions of our economy over the last 150 years, we've always hit these inflection points when there was a disruptive new technology or process for how large swaths of our economy operated and there's always the concern about displacement.
▶ 2:42:19I think that um the I think the difference now is that seeing the evolutions of AI which quite frankly are just starting and we're we're we're there's going to be things we're going to be talking about in a decade we wouldn't even be thinking about today in this hearing.
▶ 2:42:33I think it's more about making sure that our that kids going through the K12 system primarily, but then also through higher education um are learning how to leverage AI and these tools to actually become far more productive, far more innovative and then as a byproduct having their labor become be able to have a different set of value in the economy to come.
▶ 2:42:56And I think that uh it's an interesting thing uh human beings in human psychology we always try to find a way to have purpose regardless of whatever the dynamics are that are operating on the field of play of our economy. Uh one of the largest data center operators in my home state of Florida uh Equinex was the first data center to partner with an SMR provider Oaklo. These nuclear small modular reactors can generate at least uh 500 megawatts of power to our energy grid and to power uh data centers.
▶ 2:43:26Uh Mr. Bakaratari, I think I got that right. That's not right. Close. My apologies. Uh can you share some ideas on how Congress and the Trump administration can accelerate the safe deployment of clean advanced nuclear energy and AI data centers to support our growing energy and computing demands? Thank you so much for your question.
▶ 2:43:46I think in the last couple of months we have seen a really a clear linkage between you know advancing AI and AI models and reliance on new uh models modes of energy. I think uh my organization really is focused on the development of fusion energy for example because I think one of the pathways that now is showing real great success in our country is the emergence of private sector companies that are showing incredible successful models of how to get to fusion energy.
▶ 2:44:16We also have the national labs that have made major breakthroughs. You know the Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility in 2022 have made the first fusion breakthrough. So I think in particular to your question, fusion is one of the pathways that I think can enable the energy demand that we will face going forward when it comes to AI models. But that's not going to be enough alone. So I think we should pursue multiple pathways because we want to be energy independent and we want to have the best models available to the world.
▶ 2:44:47Um Mr. uh the I'm not I'm not having a good day. Uh Mrs. Mr. there. Uh, with the establishment of the special adviser for AI and crypto, what are some of the recommendations or priorities related to artificial intelligence that you would like to see them pursue? Well, one of them is what you just asked about, congressman, which is making sure that America has energy independence and a greater diversity of energy sources to power the algorithmic revolution.
▶ 2:45:13And this is something the Trump administration has taken u steps to address with executive orders and other things like that. That's that's crucial. Uh obviously a crucial part will also be the development of a national framework for artificial intelligence policy just as we had for the internet before. We need to address this conflicting patchwork of policies that's developing. That's something the administration and this Congress is obviously concerned with.
▶ 2:45:36And then there's a variety of other things having to do with national security matters and other investments in various types of uh algorithmic and robotic systems that are really really crucial among many many other things that Congress and the administration are trying to do. Uh last point I really I'll just throw this out to the panel. I was sitting with my colleague Mr.
▶ 2:45:51Perry who were just kind of theorizing about what type of advantages um uh AI advancements as well as you know I guess you could say um quantum computing what what that could actually do to modernize and streamline uh governmental operations not just federal but state and local. Um, just in your own expert opinions, what do you think the possibilities are in terms of how it would essentially help to redesign, streamline, and and bring greater amounts of efficiency into the federal government?
▶ 2:46:21Like where do you think is a good place to start? I guess I would say yeah, I would say that um, you know, if you think about this new technology of Agentic AI, it allows for a new kind of automation. We've been building automation for several decades, but a lot of it was very uh brittle. And if something slightly changed under the hood, all of a sudden, you know, that automation would no longer work.
▶ 2:46:43With Agentech AI, you can actually overcome a lot of that by having these very, you know, smart intelligent reasoners and systems that can then go and do the levels of automation that we haven't been able to do before. And I think what that's going to do is really elevate all of us to be able to work on less mundane things and more sort of advanced thinking and and and creative ideas. All right, I'm out of time everybody. Thanks so much. I yel back. Thank you. I'll now recognize Miss Crockett for five minutes. Thank you so much, Madam Chair.
▶ 2:47:12Um you know, it's interesting because um I don't know what all has taken place thus far in this hearing, but I do recall when I left we were talking about Elon. And so I want to make sure uh that we don't forget him. I know that some people want us to forget Elon and act like he never existed, but we're not going to do that. Um we are talking about AI today and I can tell you what real people in my district care about.
▶ 2:47:41I had a few town halls and I talked to some seniors and they were concerned about their data and their information and how it was being used and they wanted me to answer questions that I just didn't have the answers to about what has Elon done with their tax information, their social security information, their health information, banking information, information about their credit histories. And instead of demanding answers, Republicans just blocked our motion to subpoena him to testify before this committee.
▶ 2:48:08And I'd ask at this point for unanimous consent to enter into the record um a picture of who all was in the room when we took the vote. Madam Chair, no objection. Um as well as since our clerk was ready and she knew who was in the room, uh the actual record of who was in the room at that time. No objection.
▶ 2:48:30Thank you so Five months into the 119th Congress and no one from the administration or Doge has appeared before this committee to explain why they're invading the privacy of Americans. And the irony of it all is during a 2023 hearing. I remember Chairman Comr stating that quote, "We've witnessed big tech autocrats will their unchecked power to promote their preferred political opinions.
▶ 2:48:57And now he and committee Republicans are here helping the world's richest man to do just that. They're letting him spy on companies competing for government grants. But worse, they're letting him spy on you, the American people. Look, we can all agree that incorporating emerging technologies like artificial intelligence into government operations can be effective. However, these technologies shouldn't be used to weaponize the government against the public. So, I'm going to ask Mr. Schneer really quickly.
▶ 2:49:24Is it true that when it comes to any technologies AI or otherwise that they can be a double-edged sword? I think of technology is power and the more the technology enhances your power and whether your power is for good or for bad depends on you depends on how you're perceived. So yes, I mean techn technology has affordances and we know that modern technologies have kind of built for surveillance make surveillance easy.
▶ 2:49:51I mean, this is the most complex effective surveillance device we've ever invented, and we all willingly put it in our pockets every morning. So, so yes, technologies can be used for both good and evil, but think of of the people behind it as as the wielders. Yes, I I absolutely agree and I appreciate your answer. That's my concern.
▶ 2:50:11My concern is that these technologies will be used to weaponize the government against the public because everything that we have seen out of this particular administration has been nothing short but weaponization. So let's talk about some of the things that this administration is doing. They've announced they're going to use AI to scan the social media accounts of students who disagree with their policies. They've threatened nonprofits and universities that are t they're threatening their tax exempt status.
▶ 2:50:39They've threatened journalists for reporting stories that are critical of the president. They are literally in court arguing to end birthright citizenship. And a lot of y'all think only immigrants are going to be affected by this, but this administration has already deported American citizens. In fact, in an interview with Time magazine, Trump said, quote, "I would love to do that.
▶ 2:51:01We're looking into it." Um, Madam Chair, I'd ask unanimous consent to enter into the record um, an article published by ABC News titled, quote, "Trump wants to send US citizens to foreign prisons." Legal experts say, "No objection." Thank you. It won't be long before more Americans are targets of this administration. This administration has refused to follow the law and the Republicans are failing to do actual oversight. We don't know what they're going to do with their health records and social security information. In fact, we don't know what they're doing.
▶ 2:51:31I don't I don't think anybody does except we know that they're breaking the law. And it is frustrating to me because I am somebody that actually believes in science. I believe that we should be investing in our young people. I believe that we should not be taking research dollars away. I believe that we should be trying to come up with new technologies and that we should be leading the world. But unfortunately, I can't trust these guys to do good things because as it's already been said by Mr. Schneider.
▶ 2:51:57It is about who it is that is on the side that is asking for this to be done. And frankly, this feels like some bad um movie that we are all in and that the villains are doing bad. So, uh with that, I will yield. Okay. Thank you. I'll now recognize Mr. Burchett for five minutes. Thank you, Chair Lady.
▶ 2:52:19Um, as the 435th most powerful member of Congress, um, I have the honor of asking questions that have been asked at adn nauseium. But when I asked them a answer as if this was the first time you said and the proper response is, Congressman Burchett, that is possibly the most incredibly intelligent question that's been asked of me. So, at least my clips will show that. And the 12 people that are watching this thing are uh at home. Um, they're probably not in my district anyway.
▶ 2:52:49They're probably in Marjgery's district. Anyway, um, Mr. Theur, did I get that name right? Right. All right. All right. The majority of East Tennessans and frankly Tennessans and Americans are worried about their privacy being violated by government artificial intelligence programs. What do you think pro Congress can do to protect our privacy? And and my biggest fear in all this is Congress.
▶ 2:53:14I mean, some of these cats up here still have eight track tape players in their 1972 AMC Gremlins, and they're going to try to regulate AI. They can't hardly spell AI. Now, we're going to regulate it. So, well, Congressman, thank you for that excellent question. And, uh, as someone who used to grow up in a gremlin with an HR player, I feel great affinity for this question.
▶ 2:53:35Uh so I uh I think that uh obviously we need to make sure that privacy is protected in the digital age and this Congress has struggled with how to get that done. Um obviously we've had a multi-year multi-deade debate about baseline privacy legislation and a great deal of bipartisan consensus exists that that should be a priority before you get to a lot of the other questions about how to regulate all the various specific concerns about AI. A lot of them go back to fundamental data privacy, data security issues.
▶ 2:54:05And so I think, you know, let's not put the cart before the horse. Let's think about getting that done first. I know that's something Congress is turning to next. Also, um, regards to China, how do we maintain our dominance in the AI sector? Any of y'all can answer that. I'll ask Mr. Theor first if that's okay. In this Well, a lot of it comes down to making sure that America diffuses first. We have wonderful products. We are essentially winning one part of the AI war but losing another.
▶ 2:54:32We're winning the part in terms of developing really sophisticated high-powered frontier models and other systems and applications. But the reality is is that China may be winning the diffusion side of things. And this is why it's very very essential that we not miss out on making sure we have partnerships and deals, multilateral, minilateral approaches. The administration's been trying to do this obviously recently, but this Congress should obviously make sure that we do everything we can to make sure American technology and products lead the world because it's not just about competitive advantage. It's about our values.
▶ 2:55:00Our values are embedded in our products and of course the Chinese Communist Party values are embedded in their products of you know control, surveillance and lack of human rights. Yes sir. Uh we got to do three things. Number one is we have to continue to out innovate and outmaneuver China. Our platform should be the dominant global platforms. Number two is we have to work with our allies and partners to spread our platforms to, you know, the global south and rest of the world. And three, we got to find ways to slow down China and make it impossible for them to deploy their capabilities and to use their capabilities against us.
▶ 2:55:30Can you give me that first one again? Um, I can tell by your accent, you're probably not from East Tennessee. I'm not, sir. I'm the only person in this room that's not speaking with an accent right now. So, if you could say that first one again, brother. First one sir was that we have to make sure we out innovate and outmaneuver China. Right. I'll just add I agree with all the other panelists here and and witnesses.
▶ 2:55:52I think that this is an infinite race and the technology that is being discussed here today AI can essentially be wielded and and constructed by any sort of group of smart people and the planet grows smart people everywhere every day.
▶ 2:56:09And I think that to the extent that we can be the ones that others follow, that we can be the ones who whose software, whose hardware, whose foundation models others use, we will have uh the sort of dominant leadership position of how this whole planet evolves. Ma'am, well, I would say that China's doing um a very good job of figuring out how to defeat some of our security um vulnerabilities.
▶ 2:56:34And I think that's one area that we have a significant um we have we have a ways to go is to protect the infrastructure because North Korea and China and others um are getting better and better at at infiltrating and and and exploiting our vulnerabilities. Sir, I'm going to be contrary here. I think the US China arms race is an overblown metaphor. This is not the 1960s. This is not the Cold War. Uh science happens globally. The transformer model invented by Google. It was published. Everyone uses Deep Seek. China comes up with this model.
▶ 2:57:04It's public. Everyone is innovating based on it. Ideas are flowing crossborder. The in dominance is more companies than technology. So don't think about regulating the uh the hardware, the software, the ideas. We can't do that. And this is not the kind of world where that happens. It really is the companies and what they're doing. It going to be US companies, European companies, Chinese companies, other companies. All right. Thank you all. Chair lady, I yield back nothing. Okay. Thank you.
▶ 2:57:34I'll now recognize Mr. Subarmanum for five minutes. Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate uh us having this hearing. Uh I served in the uh second term of the Obama administration as a technology adviser in the White House. I worked a lot with a lot of great groups who were dedicated to modernizing government, making it more efficient, bringing AI to government. And uh one of them was the US Digital Service, which has now become the US Doge Service.
▶ 2:57:59Another one was 18F uh which has been completely um set apart as completely gotten rid of it. And um I'll talk about them in a second. But uh what one of the concerns I had about Doge was that there's this notion coming in that they would come in and fire all these federal civil servants and that AI would replace them and that we'd save trillions of dollars as a result. And so there's that's wrong for a bunch of reasons.
▶ 2:58:24is one, even if you fired every federal civil servant, you're actually not saving that much money in comparison to the the deficit and the debt, but two, the federal workers are so essential when it comes to helping utilize these technologies and especially the technologists that we've hired in recent years.
▶ 2:58:43And so, uh, we've heard a lot about this already from people testifying and even from members here that it's not just about having AI, it's about having to deploy AI in a responsible way and in a manner in which uh, we're not letting AI make mistakes. Uh, I'll give you an example. In Michigan about I'd say 10 years ago now, they they deployed AI to try to find fraud and they ended up finding a lot of fraud where there wasn't any fraud.
▶ 2:59:12And a lot of people got investigated their went bankrupt trying to defend themselves from getting sued uh when they and then they realized that the AI had made a big mistake. And there's so many other examples of AI being deployed in an irresponsible way uh because we simply weren't uh pairing them with a human element that could help sort of edits and uh deploy it responsibly. And so um 18F was a great example of this.
▶ 2:59:39They were actually doing a lot of great work to modernize our federal government and and bring AI to the federal government and going agency by agency and helping us procure great tools to do that. And instead, they were all fired. Basically, Doge came in and fired the entire staff at AT&TF. And now we're trying to figure out how to deploy AI in government, but we're chasing away the very technologists who can come to the federal government and help us do that.
▶ 3:00:06And so if you want AI and modernization in government, we need the best and brightest to be coming to government. But instead, what we have is a brain drain in our federal government because we're trying to to quote the OM director, put federal workers in trauma. Who wants to come and work for the federal government if the people running the federal government wants to put you in trauma? Nobody. So, we're not going to attract the best and brightest technologists to help deploy AI.
▶ 3:00:33And we're certainly not going to have what we need to have pairing up with AI in order to to deploy responsibly. And and then there's a lot of other things going on that I think are bipartisan like uh you know making sure we update our legacy systems. Uh I was just at working with air traffic control and uh I think their software is Windows 95. I've talked to many others in government who did technology. They still use cobalt, right? They still use really antiquated technology and coding.
▶ 3:01:01So, how are we supposed to deploy modern AI tools when we have these legacy systems, right? The other thing is how are we supposed to recruit and retain great people to help transition and modernize our government uh when we're chasing them all away?
▶ 3:01:15And finally, uh, this AI human collaboration, it's already running into problems in the private sector, but it has to be even better in the federal government because like in that example with Michigan where people's lives were ruined because they deployed an AI technology irresponsibly, uh, here, if if you mess with an AI tool and it doesn't get people's checks on time for social security or Medicare or Medicaid, then people are going to go without healthare.
▶ 3:01:42people are going to go without uh being able to pay their utility bills. It's going to have a terrible effect on the American people. And that's what this is really about. It's not about just deploying AI so you can say you deployed AI. It's about making sure we're deploying technology for the benefit of the American people. And so I hope we can reverse course. I hope we can work in a bipartisan way to make sure that we are taking advantage of the advances in AI but doing so in a responsible way. I yield back. Thank you. I'll now recognize myself for five minutes.
▶ 3:02:12I want to thank our participants and panelists and witnesses today for being here. One of my concerns coming from a technology background like I learned to I learned cobalt back in 1999 and a lot of our systems today they're on legacy systems. um we waste a lot of money on that and then with the advent of AI and how fast technology is moving the federal government has real challenges um with moving forward in a quick way and competing against our adversaries.
▶ 3:02:40So this my first question to all the panelists this afternoon is if you could just do one thing that could advance the federal government in any way, any agency, any capability. If you could just do one thing today to help us utilize AI and technology to move the ball forward, what is that? What is the one thing you would do? It doesn't have to be something big. It could be a small part that makes a big difference, but what is that one thing you would do right now? If we could do it tomorrow, snap our fingers. What is man?
▶ 3:03:07I would say um enable adoption on any models at any jobs in federal for memory writing all the way to execution logistics back office responsibilities anything but without enabling you know humans to start adopting these technologies I don't think we will get to the next stage where we need to be as a country Mr. So most of the innovation happening in AI is happening at small startups.
▶ 3:03:36And I think that to the extent that you can look at a team of maybe 50 people and see how long it takes for them to get their product discovered and utilized by federal agencies will determine how fast we can move and to the extent that we can solve that I think it make a big difference. Miss Miller, pick a high value process that can be automated using agents and deploy them.
▶ 3:04:00So for an example, continuing disability review in Social Security, we've seen a 9to1 ROI on that process of of reviewing continuing disabilities. That's using people. That ROI would be at least probably doubled if we used AI agents. And we would save a lot of money in a very very high value area. So pick a really high value area, deploy agents, and measure the difference so that you can use that measurement to uh inform other investments.
▶ 3:04:27Chairwoman, you're going to like my answer because I'm going to say we need the AI training extension act to be We we need we need better literacy and skills governmentwide. We have a lot of smart people working in government and sometimes it's just a matter of getting them moving in the right direction and the right training to get the job done. Mr. Schneider, I I want to see a model that wasn't built by a corporation. I want to see a public AI that democratic processes are different. They have different affordances.
▶ 3:04:52They have different uh requirements and to get a model that'll be trustworthy for government for the US government I think it needs to be US government built. I don't think it can be built. So funding and research into a public AI will give us a different sort of AI. I think it's going to be interesting. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, we have all this technology at our fingertips, but like going back to Miss Miller's comments about fraud and abuse. We have this technology, but it's almost like we write these checks and then we cross we cross track it later. Um, so there's a system called do not pay.
▶ 3:05:22It's called continuous monitoring. It still gives agencies match results the next business day, for example. And in 2025, that's dialup speed, right? When you can have it within seconds. Um, and taxpayers are put footing the bill for a 24-hour lag when there are fintech companies that are out there that can flag fraud in milliseconds. Like that technology exists. Um the March 20 executive order uh would force agencies to share all unclassified records with authorized officials.
▶ 3:05:53Yet most agencies are still swapping spreadsheets as opposed to using APIs and technology that is again readily at their fingertips. The Secretary of Labor now has statutory access to state unemployment insurance files, but those fees aren't wired into do not pay as of today right now. And it seems like we're still paying benefits first and then cross-checking later, which again makes it rampant for fraud that we've had year over year over year.
▶ 3:06:23Um, and then the IRS individual master file is written in cobalt in the 60s and uh it still drives every tax refund. Like I can't even wrap my brain around I mean if I saw a line of cobalt right now I'd probably throw up. And then to know one of the most important agencies for American taxpayers, you can get your money back from the government. It was written in cobalt from the 60s.
▶ 3:06:47So how can an algorithm catch refund fraud in real time when the source of the data lives in a mainframe computer? And then the last thing I want to say is that go GAO says that the federal government blows 80% of a hundred billion hundred billion dollar IT budget just keeping 1970 systems on life support. Um, I would love to know after this and I'll send a question followup. If there was one legacy IT system you could cancel today, what would it be?
▶ 3:07:14And I don't have time, but that is a follow-up question I would love to ask all of you. What is the one legacy IT system you would just cancelled tomorrow if you could to make our systems better? Thank you so much. And I yield back. I will now yield to uh, Ms. Lee for five minutes. Thank you, Madam Chair. Um, as we talk about AI, I don't think we can afford to ignore what's going on uh, right now in our federal government.
▶ 3:07:37So the latest out we know that Musk and um the Doge uh children went into every department and access their data sets. Initially they were digging around and using AI to cut government funding, but it's become clear now that the goal has been to amass and merge these different pots of data into one database. Trump has now tapped tech billionaire Peter Kiel's palunteer to head up that master database. We're not talking about just intergovernment memos here in in the database.
▶ 3:08:07We're talking about American social security numbers, uh, home addresses, credit card numbers, medical diagnosis, and more. All that information would just be in one place. And then they're going to unleash OPAG algorithms uh, that no one understands but them. So, they'll be able to do whatever they want. And we are supposed to just trust that they're working within our best interest.
▶ 3:08:29and we probably won't conduct much oversight because we haven't been able to bring Elon Musk or anybody associated with Doge into the Committee on Oversight uh and government account uh accountability. Um so, Mr. Schneider, looking at the immediate risks of this, is there a concern that having all of this information in one place can make it easier to hack or steal? Well, that is the fear that we keep this data separate for partially security reasons.
▶ 3:08:58I mean there's a reason why that when data is shared between agencies, it's done under certain rules and why there are security uh protections around the data. So it's it's the data being consolidated that is a risk. Also the data leaving the government databases where they were that's a risk. They're being moved into uh private companies. They're being used by algorithms. Well, you said no one understands but them. It's actually worse than that. No one understands including them.
▶ 3:09:24These algorithms are opaque and we don't know the quality of the data as data is is combined. Talking about cobalt, a lot of that is how the data is presented and making sure that it's it's the same across. Uh in my initial uh statement, I talked about the that uh story about 15-y olds getting social security. That was a problem with understanding how the cobalt wasn't coded. Certainly. and and if you don't know that, you're going to have bad inferences that no one's going to understand and no one's going to check.
▶ 3:09:54Thank you. So, beyond the concerns with the data all being in one place, less secure, one less secure place, we also need to be concerned about with with what Trump and these text billionaires are going to do with that data. Um, just very quickly and yes or nos, Mr. Shar, could an AI system theoretically be used to decide if someone qualifies for Medicaid? Certainly. How about um used to make decisions around veterans benefits? Yep. Could AI be used to make hiring decisions? It can make any yes or no question you want.
▶ 3:10:21You know, just thank you for entertaining uh that Trump and his administration can take all this collected data and use it to profile people to make decisions about them to deny them benefits. And we know from his Twitter rants that he's incapable of being unbiased. Then they're trying to prevent any state pass guard rails on AI through the provision in the reconciliation bill that you guys unseriously call the big beautiful bill. That provision would ban any state regulation of AI for 10 years.
▶ 3:10:49Our government can't just play loose and fast when it comes to people's personal data and labs. We've already seen the consequences of improperly deployed AI. Michigan had to refund $21 million to residents who were wrongfully accused of unemployment fraud from their AI system. A tenant screening system called Safe Rent was accused of violating their Fair Housing Act, uh the Fair Housing Act because their AI algorithm disproportionately scored black and Hispanic renters lower than white applicants.
▶ 3:11:19Most of this technology is still so new uh and needs time to be vetted and improved. Look at what happens when AI is used just in government reports. The Make America Healthy again report cited to multiple studies that didn't exist. Can you imagine if chat GPT was deciding if you qualify for housing or not? That's not to say that all AI is bad, but it is dangerous to work quickly. When you move fast and break things in the government, people get hurt.
▶ 3:11:47Carnegie Melon University, which is in my district, has um a center for AI standards and innovation and has been working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to make a methodical approach to assessing the benefits and risks of AI models, thinking about the ethics of AI. Work like theirs is vital to ensuring that AI programs are used safely, accurately, and without bias to the best of our ability.
▶ 3:12:14recognizing that a society without biases uh is far is far off. But that is the approach the Trump administration should be taking, not packaging up all of our personal data and handing it over to unvetted unvetted tech billionaires. Um I thank you all for your time and I yield back. The gentle lady yields. I now recognize myself for five minutes. We just passed the one big beautiful bill through the House of Representatives and now it's gone on to the Senate where where they will be making changes to the bill.
▶ 3:12:45Um if there's any changes made to the one big beautiful bill, it comes back to the House for a vote and we get a second bite at the apple. Now, while this bill was going through committees and being discussed in the House of Representatives, no one on either side of the aisle that I know of, Republican or Democrat, brought up this particular clause on one single page in a a over 1,000page bill.
▶ 3:13:13And I want to bring this up because I think AI is incredibly important. I support AI in many different faculties. However, I think that at this time as our generation is very much responsible not only here in Congress but leaders in tech industry and leaders in states and all around the world have an incredible responsibility of the future and development regulation and laws of AI.
▶ 3:13:43It's such a such an important responsibility. It literally affects our children and grandchildren's future. So, I take this responsibility incredibly sincere. So much so that this past week I have come out in full transparency and said when I voted for the one big beautiful bill, I didn't know about this clause. I thought I was voting on taxes, energy, and border security.
▶ 3:14:07And this clause right here says a memoratorum in general except as provided in paragraph 2. No state or political subdivision thereof may enforce during a 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this act any law or regulation of that state or a political subdivision thereof limiting, restricting or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems or automated
▶ 3:14:38decision systems entered into interstate commerce. That is a comprehensive 10year memoratorium. Actually, what that is is it is a pause for 10 years in federalism. This right here, if passed into law, will tell states they cannot regulate or make laws regarding AI.
▶ 3:15:03That means the federal government is the only governing body that can regulate or make laws for AI in the United States of America. And I'd like to ask each of you um do you support federalism? Yes or no? I'll start with you. Do you support federalism? Yes or no? State rights. It's a yes or no question. I don't think I'm able to answer this question based on my background to be honest with you. Okay.
▶ 3:15:33Well, then I take that as a no. Mr. Shaw, do you support I I do support I do support state rights and just from from a a small company standpoint, I would say whatever we can do to make it easier for a young company to navigate the 50 states will be very important because otherwise Well, either you support federalism or you don't. One or the other. It's a yes or no. Yes. Okay. Miss Miller, do you Yes. Yes. Mr. Theer. Yes.
▶ 3:15:59In line with the White House and with Speaker Johnson, I agree that federalism is important, but federalism is a two-sided coin of both states rights and interstate commerce. So, we need to protect both. The Constitution is clear on federalism. It's one side, state rights or none. Mr. Schneider, I think that provision is nutty. Okay. So, does that do you support federalism? Yes or no? In general, yes. Oh, in in general. So, that's vague. I'm not It's vague, but that that provision is nutty. Okay. So, I still didn't get an answer clearly on federalism.
▶ 3:16:26Um, can you predict the future of AI in one year, five years, or 10 years? I'm sorry. I'm I apologize. No problem. No, no problem. Um, no. Uh, I don't think anybody can predict that. I think every model has become bigger and better and more transformative. Right. So, the answer is no. I'm short on time. Mr. Shaw, no. Or yes. I think it's hard to predict uh Can you predict it period? Okay. Miss Miller, can you predict AI? No. Mr. No, Mr.
▶ 3:16:56Schneider, not a chance. No, you can't. In the state of Georgia, jobs are extremely important and AI is whether we like it or not, and it's helpful in many ways, and it's not helpful, will replace jobs. I have a manufacturing district, and the manufacturing companies are important, but so are the people's jobs, and if our state cannot regulate or make laws to protect people's jobs, people are going to go hungry. They're not going to have paychecks. They're not going to put roofs over their family head famil family's heads.
▶ 3:17:27And I think this is such a serious issue that we need to look at this through I'll state it very clearly. I'm pro-humanity. I am not protranshumanity. And when it comes to AI and regulation, when we get to vote on this bill again, I will be be voting no because of this clause. And we will be working on this further. Thank you so much for being here today. I I now yield to Mr. Miss Simon.
▶ 3:17:56Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you all for coming today and sitting in this very chilly room. I think we've all learned so much. Um, I come from the Bay Area, which is, as you all know, the technological uh gold mine for the artificial intelligence community. I'm so proud of that.
▶ 3:18:15In March, actually I participated I actually convened a table with AI innovators and leaders in my congressional district on how AI is and will continue to enable access to high quality health care, data sharing, and of course opportunities for physicians and folks in the industry to expand access to the many wonderful folks who need it and deserve it.
▶ 3:18:43We already know that AI is advancing life-saving early detection for cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, and I can go on and on and can save clinicians time and charting and note-taking and better spent on patients and actual working with families and folks who need them. This technology helps patients self-manage their diseases with suggested resources and reminders to take medications. Again, as you all know, I can go on and on.
▶ 3:19:10And as somebody um myself with a visual impairment, I was born as a preeie. I was born legally blind. I cannot tell you how artificial intelligence has led the disabled community to be able to live with more independence and more self-determination. And it's exceeded in this moment our wildest expectations. The guard rails are needed. Absolutely. Regulation is needed.
▶ 3:19:37But again, so many of us from impacted communities are so excited about what this technology allows for us to do. The federal government has this responsibility and duty not only to set a standard around data privacy and security, but to follow the best practices. I have a lot written uh but time is short. So, I just actually have a a qu a couple of questions that I'll just go straight to.
▶ 3:20:03Um, and again, I want to thank you all today, and I'm sure all of our offices will be working with not only you all, but leaders in the industry moving forward forever. So, my my question is actually for Mr. Shiner. You know, I have met with, as I mentioned, AI companies in my district who manage very sensitive health data, very sensitive health information with great care and sensibility and sensitivity.
▶ 3:20:29They only use and these are the companies that I have met with they only deidentified patient information data sharing and encryption and otherwise control access. Can you describe how our current administration's actions differ from the industry standards and best practices around data privacy and security? Oh, in so many ways.
▶ 3:20:53Uh so we've we've seen examples of uh of Doge dismantling security protections inside organizations. We've seen them taking data out of secure enclaves and taking it off premises and we don't know where. Uh we have seen them uh combining data in ways that are contrary to law. If you think about it, uh healthcare is is controlled by HIPPA. There's a regulation about healthcare privacy. Deidentified data is is a science.
▶ 3:21:22The census has a whole program on how to deidentify data to be used by researchers without uh revealing private information. So we can do this if we choose to. Doge chose not to. Well, I have a little bit more time.
▶ 3:21:41uh I want to ask so I so I I would want to add u moving it into AI models has its own risks and it's the it's several risks it's the risks of the model being trained on data that's private and then could make it public we see researchers being able to pull private data out of a model so without safeguards the training process uh fails in privacy then the data will be used as an input to whatever the model is to produce decisions and that
▶ 3:22:11also can be a violation of privacy. So all through these processes we can build and we can build safeguards. I mean I think that that was that's your point. Yes, we just have to do it and there's a reason why you do this slowly and deliberately within organizations and not just pull the data out. Thank you sir. And actually this is a question that as you're talking just derived in my mind. Anyone on the panel um want to talk about the innovations in healthcare and AI like particularly around diagnostics?
▶ 3:22:39I only have about 30 seconds but I think exciting innovation and folks will live longer I believe and from what I've heard. Anyone want to jump in? Yeah, Congresswoman, thank you for your leadership on this front. I I will submit for the record a series of reports that my organization has put together on AI and public health where we cite specific ways that AI is being utilized in drug discovery, medical devices, and so on and so forth. I'll just mention that we've had a 50-year war going on cancer and we haven't made as much progress as we need to, but last year 68,000 people died of cancer and a lot of these things can be addressed now with power of artificial intelligence.
▶ 3:23:09I appreciate that. And Madam Chair, thank you for for your time and allowing me this time. My husband died of cancer. I know that he could have lived longer if we had these technologies. We got two years with him. Again, that was 10 years ago. Changed our lives forever. Thank you for your work, your innovation, and clearly we need safeguards, but the future is bright. Appreciate you all. The gentle lady's time is expired. I now recognize Mr. Timmons from South Carolina. Thank you, Madam Chair. The greatest national security threat we face is debt.
▶ 3:23:39We have 37 trillion in debt. We have a $ 1.8 trillion annual deficit. The the work this this administration has done over the last few months has been designed to try to find waste, fraud, and abuse to help mitigate that. They're also working to help grow the economy through tax reform, through uh renegotiating trade agreements, through deregulation, through streamlining permitting. The list goes on and on.
▶ 3:24:01But I think that AI has a huge opportunity to grow the work that Doge has done as it relates to seeking out ways fraud and abuse. So the main thing that they did early on was to get all the government agencies to communicate uh using the same lang language to code the same to then be able to create transparency and track data from all the different government agencies.
▶ 3:24:24And that effort was really the beginning because now that everything goes through Treasury, now that we can track payment systems, we now have to layer on technology. And some of that is fairly simple. For example, I've introduced the Tabs Act. The Tabs Act, timely, accurate benefits.
▶ 3:24:38And what that act does is it uses a pilot program that was done uh in Missouri uh where they instead of using um antiquated ways of confirming income eligibility for Medicaid, they uh use third party uh website to um verify eligibility immediately and then the second you're no longer eligible, you are removed uh from whatever benefit it is. And so that that resulted in a 17% reduction.
▶ 3:25:06So, the way this technology works is you say, "All right, I'm on hard times. I want to get uh whatever government benefit." And they say, "All right, well, you got to log into your bank account." And then when you log into your bank account, it says, "Okay, you have a Venmo, you have a cash app, you have a zel. You have to log into that, too." And then immediately they say, "You're eligible or you're not eligible." And so, you're actually getting benefits faster than normal. And, um, this has a huge potential to save money. And that's 17% of Medicaid is about $150 billion if you do it over the entire federal government.
▶ 3:25:36And you know, one thing that that the one big beautiful bill did was instead of confirming eligibility once a year, which I think is ridiculous, we're now confirming eligibility twice a year. Well, why don't we confirm eligibility every day using technology? This is not hard. The technology exists. All we have to do is implement it. So, that's one way that we can um further find ways for fraud and abuse. Uh because I think we can all agree that if you're not eligible because you make too much money or you're not eligible because and this is the next step because you're not the person who you say you are um then you shouldn't get government benefits.
▶ 3:26:06So I'm working on tabs 2 which is using technology to confirm you are who you say you are. And this is just using uh billions of publicly available pieces of data that you know for example if you have an email address that was created in the last year and you're 45 years old you're probably not who you say you are. If you have three different phone numbers uh that's not normal. So, they're able to use technology, publicly available information to confirm um an individual requesting benefits is who they say they are.
▶ 3:26:33And honestly, that would not only help means tested programs, it would help um any any government program. If you're saying you you are who you say you are for social security, I mean, that's not means tested, but um we could use it to seek out ways, fraud, and abuse. So, those are two things, two two ways we can we can use technology to reserve government benefits for American citizens that deserve them. Um, how can we grow that effort? How can we build on that effort uh using AI?
▶ 3:27:03Miss um Baktari, thank you. Um sir, I think those two examples uh indicate the potential that we have in AI adoption for government services. I think we got to do three things. Um the underlying issue that we have here is that we need to upgrade or modernize our IT infrastructure because you cannot deploy AI if you don't have the necessary infrastructure underneath that. And so to do that we need to do three things. Number one is we need to upgrade our platforms.
▶ 3:27:33Number two is we have to up update our policies obviously and number three is we have to work on retraining and reskilling our people. Miss Miller, what are your thoughts? There's a lot we can do in this area. I mean this is what I the the software company that I created just does this. Uh and mining open source intelligence to identify whether somebody is who they say they are is the lowest hanging fruit and the the best use cases we can do in the fraud space for um for government programs and not just means tested programs. every grant program.
▶ 3:28:00We put a trillion a trillion dollars in in federal money out every year to states for grants and we have very little understanding of where that money is going. But we can use AI and open source intelligence to very quickly identify if it's a shell company or even an you know an organized crime ring that's actually getting that that money. And on the organized crime front, a lot of these involve um changing addresses once they request benefits and things of that nature. And a I could easily say, "Oh, it's weird.
▶ 3:28:28There's a PO box in Eastern Europe that gets 43 checks a day. That's weird. 100%. There's geoloccation. There's all kinds of be behavioral biometrics that AI can flag. You can use, you know, probably dozens of different data inputs to identify fraud today using AI. And this is not a a partisan issue. I think everyone can agree that only people that deserve benefits, that are entitled to benefits, should get them.
▶ 3:28:50So again, I think using technology to make sure that um we're we're being wise with our taxpayer dollars is something that is a no-brainer and I look forward to working with my colleagues across the aisle to do just that. Thank you, Madam Chair. I yield back. The gentleman yields. I now recognize Mr. Men from California. Thank you, Madam Chair. Appreciate the opportunity to discuss artificial intelligence in the federal government. Uh, of course, AI has been around for a while, but uh it's recently hit, I think we all agree, a tipping point of exponential and profound growth.
▶ 3:29:18uh innovation and advancement are now being measured in in days or even seconds or minutes as opposed to years. And uh this rapid development of AI is is poised to radically transform our society and our economy. Uh and that's going to create a lot of great benefits I believe but also a lot of challenges including to our workforce, our national security, data privacy, and a whole host of other issues. And uh these benefits and challenges of AI are also important to consider as we contemplate uh bringing more AI into our federal government.
▶ 3:29:47And one important point, and I know it's been made, but I just want to re-emphasize this. Uh AI is only as good as the inputs it receives, inputs it's trained on, uh the people who train it, and the objectives it's trained to try to achieve. Uh and that's something that I do think is is being lost right now. Uh in in the rush to think about AI, I I think we have to think about what some of the goals are. A lot of mention has been made of the rash and reckless actions uh made by the Trump administration specifically Elon Musk and Doge uh around AI.
▶ 3:30:17And uh again I think what are what are we looking at as far as goals? I think we want to make sure that the missions of our different agencies of the tasks they are meant to accomplish uh is what's in in mind and not just simply cutting for the sake of cutting. And so for example um you know when we think about AI Doge may be using AI right now to surveil communications of federal agencies performing potential cuts including staff and programs. Uh they have stated that they want to use generative AI to automate much of the work previously done by civil servants.
▶ 3:30:48Uh but there's a lot of potential mistakes there as well as the data privacy aspects that uh have been touched on in previous uh questions. But uh this data privacy and and we don't actually know at this point what Elon Musk and Doge have been able to scrape. They certainly have had access to a lot of our data uh illegally. So I would add um and what have they done with that? We've been told that they've downloaded them on private servers. Uh this committee has not done any oversight on this question, but I think it's an important one.
▶ 3:31:15uh as we think about AI is is Grock or uh Elon Musk's other AI uh models are they are they being trained on data that is only available because of his uh position at Doge? Uh this also creates a lot of national security risks as well. And so I I guess my first question is to Commissioner Schneider. Uh from a national security perspective, what safeguards should we be thinking about implementing uh to make sure that we're protecting sensitive data while still promoting intellig national artificial intelligence design and innovation?
▶ 3:31:44I mean we have the safeguards the regulations are in place that protect the data we know how to do it we have been doing it for years for decades and it's a matter of implementing them the problem as you said was what doge did was illegal was was contrary uh to the laws and when I think about using AI in organizations it's a matter of bringing the technology in and using it in a way that makes sense there's a lot of talk about using it to uh find fraud that seems like a good good use I would want add I I see Mr.
▶ 3:32:14Timmons left, but how about uh tax tax fraud and that is like the for-profit arm of the government and we get a lot of bang for our buck for looking for tax fraud. I think AI would be great at a first thing, but it's a matter of keeping the data in the organizations with the laws that protect it.
▶ 3:32:31And I think Isaac Azimov wrote a book about this a long time ago, but something similar that we ought to be training AI as we think about it uh to follow basic rules and principles uh that we want them to follow first and foremost uh instead of just thinking about the go end goals in mind. Now again want to get back to the point of goals being important. Uh when we look at social security, when we look at programs like Medicare and Medicaid, it's easy to simply just cut costs.
▶ 3:32:56Uh but if we are diminishing service, if if we're just looking at cutting costs and not at the service being provided or the efficiency of the service being provided, we end up with huge mistakes. At the same time, if you have a bunch of coders out there who don't have any context about the program, how it's been administered, you end up with huge problems as we saw. Uh you know, we we saw that Doge flew into the administration without even understanding the basics of how Social Security was coding its different entries uh in the Cobalt coding process.
▶ 3:33:23And so, uh, in that review, they noticed entries that made it seem like the administration was paying individuals, uh, benefits who are aged 150 or older. Trump and Musk actually claimed this falsely. Uh, and again, it was because, uh, you relied on computer wizard geniuses like the 22-year-old coder named Big Balls instead of actual administration professionals who understood what was going on. Similarly, with Medicare and Medicaid, uh, the goal here should be to maximize health care in an efficient way, not simply to cut costs.
▶ 3:33:51The cheapest way to administer health care, of course, is just to let everyone die. That's cheaper than administering healthcare. And so, we can't lose the forest for the trees here. So, I I see I'm out of time. The last point I just want to make is is the 10-year moratorum uh on AI regulation. Something that is outrageous, something that was slipped in in the dark at night. Uh it's a shocking provision includes so shocking that my colleague, Madam Chair, Taylor Green, said she would vote against the entire big beautiful bill if this provision wasn't. The gentleman's time is expired.
▶ 3:34:20Now recognize Luna of Florida. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Um, you know, I want to thank you all for being here today. One of the biggest concerns I have with this whole discussion on AI is a failure to admit first and foremost that um, it is appear in the next 10 years that the way that we have grown up and know life with AI will be forever changing. With that being said, there are a few differences that I think most people acknowledge and that AI lacks a few things.
▶ 3:34:49is one being a soul also empathy and we are not gods or god and so I think that we're playing a dangerous game especially moving into a future that's simply unknown right now especially with if we do not essentially develop the first AI super weapon essentially that's what this is um whoever does will essentially control the world and I think that that's a very serious topic that needs to be discussed right now u but specifically to transhumanism and coupling of AI with humanity
▶ 3:35:19What regulatory frameworks can be established to ensure AIdriven transhumanist technologies like brain computer interfaces prioritize human safety and consent? I'm opening this up to everyone on the panel. I have a few questions. So, I'd like to get through this. So, just please limit your responses. Mr. B, if you want to go first or down there, either or. I I'll just briefly say, Congresswoman, that there's been a lot of work done on AI governance by multiple bodies and entities.
▶ 3:35:44I just want to cite something that actually came from the Biden administration on this about the applicability of so many existing laws and regulations to AI. And their leading uh regulators for four large agencies uh said before leaving office that basically we have the ability to enforce the respective laws and regulations to promote responsible innovation and automated systems and that basically AI does not get an exemption from civil rights laws, from consumer protections, unfair and deceptive practices, fraud, so on and so forth.
▶ 3:36:13So we have a lot of policies that do regulate many of the fears you're raising. Um is there uh the possibility of regulation though that exists that would enable transhumanist enhancements that exacerbate social inequalities or basically financial inequalities creating an elite class of enhanced individuals. I bring that up because we're talking about low-level jobs potentially being removed from the workforce.
▶ 3:36:36people that have and can afford the ability of, for example, imple implementing or implanting chips given access to unknown amounts of, you know, knowledge and essentially creating a the first superhuman. Um, this is a real concern. I I know it might come across as funny to other people, but I am generally concerned about this. You know, from a bipartisan perspective here, we're talking about humanity versus machine.
▶ 3:37:00Hopefully in a flowery world we would have it set up to where it could, you know, improve society for the best, but I'm also in politics and I have a very unfortunately um sometimes negative perspective on the world because I've seen the worst of humanity in this job. Uh so science fiction speaks of this a lot. I mean there's a lot of people who think about this notion of of halves and have nots and how technology will exacerbate that and that's going to depend on how it's available and how much money it costs and who can get it.
▶ 3:37:28uh Nina Farah writes a lot about uh AI and brain interfaces and what we can do to protect humanity in that world. So I do re actually recommend talking to her. She's the smartest person I know on that particular question. Okay.
▶ 3:37:41Um also what role can AI itself play in monitoring and mitigating risks associated with transhumanist technologies such as detecting biases and enhancement Um I think a lot of the conversation so far uh since Chad Chip came out is about foundation models and how they operate and their how they hallucinate and some of the shortcomings of them and the risks with them. But a lot of these problems can be overcome at the application layer.
▶ 3:38:10And Miss Miller and I represent companies who build applications on top of many models. And so if you think about that framework, what you understand then is the responsibility of some of these outcomes, the responsibility of some of these behaviors isn't just left to the model. It's it's left to the vendor and the developer of how you train it, how you package it, how you check for issues and guardrails and all of that. So real quick, I have one more question just real quick. Yes or no?
▶ 3:38:37Would either or any of you be in favor of the US government through either the DIA, NSA, all agencies involved, Pentagon, even creating a super AI, I would maybe term it guardian AI to actually train up based on our principles to defend the United States and potentially world against maybe a more nefarious actor like China creating the same super weapon because AI can only fight AI. I think you guys would all agree with that. Um, in an effort to defend the homeront. I think we can't do that yet. Not yet, but maybe in the future. May maybe in the future. Okay.
▶ 3:39:07Uh maybe, but I need more about the details about what that means because there's a lot to unpack there. Unqualified probably to weigh in on that one. I'm supportive of any sort of sovereign AI that that we think sovereign AI would be a good name. I think Governor Long cannot do it. I think public private partnership should be required in this case because otherwise we will not be able to confront China. Thank you. The gentle lady's times expired. I now recognize Mr. Frost from Florida. Um thank you chair.
▶ 3:39:35the, you know, the first few months of the Trump administration have been unhinged. At several events in my district, I've heard from outraged constituents. Um, people, as I've traveled across the country, I've heard the same from people in many different districts. And there's two common themes I I keep hearing about. Number one, people that are angry at the administration's attempts to uh degrade vital services like Social Security, Medicaid, um, FEMA, um, and the VA.
▶ 3:40:01and also fear about what Elon Musk and uh folks at Doge um have done and could be doing with the data of uh American citizens and the American people. Things like health records, banking information, and social security numbers. These conversations are really just the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of constituents have also called into my office with the same fear that their private information is falling into the wrong hands. Um Mr.
▶ 3:40:27Schneider reporting in May revealed that Doge is now feeding unknown amounts um and unknown types of sensitive government data into Grock, the AI program owned by Elon Musk. I find this extremely concerning. What are the potential harms that individuals now face from Doge doing something like Well, we don't know. So, two things I would worry about feeding it to Grock and also giving it to Palunteer to train their models.
▶ 3:40:55So once it's now left the government, it's going to different companies for different things. And I think that the fact that we don't know what the data is, what's being done to it, how it's being used, how it's being protected is is in a grave danger, right? We secure that data because it is important and now it is somewhere else. Also, also we don't know the accuracy. I I haven't talked about I would worry about data poisoning.
▶ 3:41:20If you were an American adversary, one of the things you might want to do is go to that illprotected data and change stuff because now the model is being trained on false data. And we we we've talked a little bit about hallucinations and and making bad decisions. In what way could the dumping of Americans private data into personal um and corporate AI programs create conflicts of interest or create personal enrichment for certain people?
▶ 3:41:45Well, I mean data is power and whoever has the data has the power and for us to give that data to corporations really with with you know not not even charging them for it gives them an enormous amount of power. How they can use that is going to depend on what they're doing and future technologies are going to make different things possible but think of it broadly as it increases the power of those who have the data. And it's important for everyone to, you know, remember that we've seen many different conflicts of interest throughout this administration.
▶ 3:42:14Um, we've also seen Trump, Musk, and um, other folks dismantle data privacy protections and ignore law after law. Since we can't rely on the president or his administration to obey the law, what other safeguards currently exist to keep our data safe? That's it's all you got. I mean, you as a citizen, I mean, my data that is at the IRS, I can do nothing about it, right? I am relying on you, the government, to protect my data. If you're not doing that at large, I'm kind of screwed.
▶ 3:42:43For 130 days, we've seen um Musk and other actors lurk inside our most sensitive databases, grabbing whatever private data they want with zero to little oversight. Um especially no oversight from the United States Congress, including Republican members of Congress as well. How can we, as the oversight committee, assess the damage that's been done and hold people accountable? I think you actually have to do the work. There's there's an enormous amount of investigation has to happen. We don't know what data was taken. We don't know where it went.
▶ 3:43:13We don't know where it is. And that's going to be work figuring it out. But I think it's work that has to be done because I think the first step to fixing the problem is understanding what it is. I mean, we can stop the flow. You can get close down the loopholes. You can get these people out of the organizations. You can start protecting the data. But now the data is gone. You have to figure out where it is, who has it, and then take it back. Interestingly enough, you know, you brought up the word accountability, which is really important.
▶ 3:43:40Um, when the administration changed over from Democrat to Republican, I think little things matter. I think words matter. And, you know, there's there's a word that changed in the name of this committee. The word accountability used to be in the name of this committee. And they changed it from government accountability to government reform.
▶ 3:43:58It seems like a lot of my Republican Republican colleagues have no interest in holding this administration accountable for the misuse of uh uh data and Congress has a horrible um record in being able to legislate as it relates to technology. I think there's huge educational barriers. We bury our heads in the sand until the problem gets out of hand and then someone comes up with a grand solution of banning it.
▶ 3:44:22Um, this is what happened with social media and unfortunately what I think might also happen with AI unless we get our stuff together here. Thank you. I yield back. The gentleman yields. I now recognize Mr. Crane from Arizona. Thank you for holding this hearing today. I want to say thank you to all the panelists for coming. I think we're all aware that the age of AI is here and expansion is absolute and unstoppable. But I do want to talk about what I feel to be the elephant in the room when we talk about AI.
▶ 3:44:51And one of my major concerns as a representative of the people to this country is our workforce. Recently, Daario Amodi, CEO of Anthropic, one of the world's most powerful creators of AI, has a scary warning for all of us. He says this, AI could wipe out h half of the entrylevel white collar jobs and spike unemployment 10 to 20% in the next one to five years. Other experts have said that number is closer to 50% in the next 5 years.
▶ 3:45:20He also said that AI companies and the government need to stop sugar coating what is coming. The possible elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting, and other white collar professions, especially entrylevel gigs.
▶ 3:45:33He says, Steve Bannon, who was a top adviser to President Trump in his first term, recently told Axios, I don't think anyone is taking into consideration how much administration, administrative, managerial, and tech jobs for people under 30, entry-level jobs that are so important in your 20s are going to be eviscerated. And it's already happening. Um, re research that we have done shows that IBM just laid off 8,000 employees as of last week.
▶ 3:46:01McKenzie, a consulting firm, 5,000 employees as of May 28th. Dell has laid off 6,000 employees in 2024. Intel has laid off 15,000 employees in 2024. And all of these were credited to um AI and efficiency. Estimated total jobs lost 214,000 um total jobs lost to AI.
▶ 3:46:26I recently asked AI what careers what are the careers that will be replaced first by AI and AI told me data entry clerks, telemarketers, retail cashiers, warehouse workers, parillegals and legal assistants, basic customer support representatives, bank tellers, fast food workers, IT support technicians, tax preparers. So we're talking about tens of millions of jobs.
▶ 3:46:52And I think that uh that's very scary even though we've been talking about the efficiencies of AI, how much money it can save the federal government, corporations, and how we have to keep up with China. Uh one of my questions to you guys, and I'm not blaming any of you, but does it bother you at all that the technology you're developing is set to destroy tens of millions of jobs? I want to start with you, Mr. Shaw. You know, technology over time is is generally raised the quality of living for all humans.
▶ 3:47:20And you know, um, I know a lot of my fellow CEO AI, uh, folks out there try to grab headlines with some of their claims. Uh, I haven't seen Daario's math behind all of this, but I think the the point there is correct that lowpaying entry jobs will be will be uh, taken on by computers, but it gives us a chance to reposition those individuals, reskill them. And I don't think this is going to end.
▶ 3:47:45I think is going to continue for the next you know every seven years we're going to be talking about this uh what we've found is that for customers of ours you look at the private sector they've taken those efficiencies turned them into profits profits have then led to more ambition to grow their businesses in fact majority of our customers have actually increased their employee headcount over time because they want to endeavor to do more things so I think when we start to um automate mundane tasks we can start to do more interesting work and I
▶ 3:48:15think organizations will take full advantage of that. And you think that applies across the board to all those careers and industries that I just listed off, not just the ones in tech? I think that there will be changes to many industries because of this. Um, and I think we're going to have to as a species respond to what this brings us and be able to if we want to continue to lead the global race in AI, uh, our agility is going to really matter.
▶ 3:48:44I would just add I would like to just add that I mean this is I mean Mr. Schneider mentioned this earlier. This is a serious issue. We are going to displace a lot of people and we don't have the training right now to give them new jobs. We can't just expect people. We're talking about unemployment rates of 15% of college graduates. Not to say nothing of those who haven't gotten a co got a college degree. So I do believe this is a serious issue and we're not it's not going to get any better. I have one more question. I want to shift gears real quick and talk about AI and defense.
▶ 3:49:13Um, Mr. Bag Jac Rakari, I'm sorry. Um, I looked at your resume. You were the executive director of National Security Commission, chief of staff to National Security Adviser, uh, Lieutenant General HR McMaster, former chief of staff to de deputy secretary of defense. Recently, the Ukrainians launched a drone attack on Russian soil. Um, Ukraine said over 40 bombers or about a third of Russia's strategic nuclear bomber fleet was damaged.
▶ 3:49:42It was reported that this was done with AI. Do you think that um this could have been this attack could have been possible without the US help with AI intelligence? The the gentleman's times expired, but go ahead and answer quickly. So, I don't have any insights into that, sir. I've left the government a couple of years ago, but it only shows how uh technology is changing the battlefield today. And I think how Ukraans are adapting to this new battlefield is really an example that they've showcased last weekend. Thank you. I yield back. I now recognize Mr. Bell from Missouri.
▶ 3:50:12Thank you. Uh and thank you to our witnesses for being here today to speak on this important issue. Americans are concerned about AI and I want and and want protections from the risks it poses to their privacy, security, rights, and freedoms. Key AI guard rails that provided these protections at the federal level were repealed.
▶ 3:50:34Now, House Republicans are pushing legislation that ban states from enforcing laws or regulations to protect Americans from AI for a full decade. Mr. Snyder, why why is it important that the federal government adopt AI responsibly and with necessary oversight? Because doing it badly is going to harm people. I mean these are powerful. So these are technologies that are going to in a sense replace human activities.
▶ 3:51:04Uh whether they're going to be assistants to humans or they're going to replace humans at at for low-level decisions, they're going to do the things that humans did. And we know that when humans make bad decisions in government, people get hurt. So AIS are going to do the same thing. Now the problem is they can do it faster, right? They can do it more efficiently. So they could more efficiently hurt people. They could more efficiently help people. And that's why you need to do it responsibly.
▶ 3:51:33When Doge pressured Secretary Hexath and the Department of Defense to quickly purge any mention of race across its web pages, the agency used AI. The result was the Pentagon removed a tribute to Jackie Robinson, an American sports legend, civil rights icon, and World War II American Army veteran who served his country honorably simply because it acknowledged his race.
▶ 3:52:04We're talking about American history that was flagged and removed in the blink of an eye. Mr. Snider, without such safeguards, what risks do we face in ensuring the prevention of purges, distortions, or discrimination in federal AI? So again, it's it's less the AI and more the people that used it. And the weirder one is we removed the page about the Anola gay bomber, which was an aircraft and not actually gay. It just had the name.
▶ 3:52:35Right? So when these technologies are used without human oversight, I mean as humans we could recognize that's ridiculous. But an AI doesn't have that context. An AI is going to do like any computer exactly what it's told. And if it's given bad instructions, if it's not uh monitored, if there isn't audit, there isn't integrity in the system, you're going to get bad outcomes. So I mean the AI did it, but blame the humans who asked the AI to do it.
▶ 3:53:03Removing access to information is just the first step towards deeper consequences. Doge is creating lasting impact in our export in in our expert federal workforce alone. We have seen a purging of nonpartisan federal workforce. Even though the Government Accountability Office has for years been sounding the alarm that a lack of skilled workers will lead to more waste, fraud, and abuse in government.
▶ 3:53:32Understanding how AI works and its possible biases in programming requires a very specific skill set, one which we're losing every day. Uh Mr. Snyder, again, why is it important to retain skilled workers with institutional knowledge who can carefully oversee the integration and use of AI across our federal agencies? Because the AI is not ready to do that yet. you know, without the people, the AI is going to run without context.
▶ 3:54:01And you're going to get mistakes like the ones we just talked about. And, you know, these are mistakes that are in some ways theoretical. They're they're about information, but they also harm people. We're talking about using AI to reduce uh fraud. Now, you're going to have problems with false negatives. Is fraud you're not going to catch. You're going to have problems with false positives. There's fraud you're going to catch. It isn't real. really good example comes from the UK.
▶ 3:54:26Horizon software was used to audit uh rural post offices and flagged hundreds of instances of fraud that wasn't real, costing people their jobs. There were suicides. This is the problem of getting it wrong. And humans can make these same mistakes. We just make them slower. AI makes the pace of this much worse.
▶ 3:54:46In the name of efficiency, the government has recently slashed funding for JobCore, a program that offers free career technical training for young people aged 16 to 24. Instead of investing in our future workforce, they've eliminated a program that could help fill the shortage of skilled workers in emerging tech careers. When it comes to the federal government, it's not a question of just efficiency, but also of equity, fairness, and safety.
▶ 3:55:14I believe in efficiency and I believe that technology can do enormous good for the American people. But this is a country that has a history that AI cannot erase. I look forward to ensuring that when the federal government employs AI, it actually serves the needs of those who have too often been left behind. The gentleman's times expired. I yield back. Thank you. I now recognize Mr. Magcguire from Virginia. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you to our witnesses for being here today.
▶ 3:55:41I want to start by saying that I agree with Madame Chair uh Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green and that we have somehow we missed this 10-year ban on AI state law uh state laws and I hope that we'll fix that in the US Senate. The President Trump and the White House, they said that we must ensure American AI dominance. And just yes or no real quick, just yes or no real quick. Do you agree with the Trump administration that you the US must have AI dominance?
▶ 3:56:11Just yes or no real quick? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. No. I don't think it works that way Thank you. All right. Um, so Doge has done an outstand done outstanding work in identifying waste, fraud, and abuse. They have brought to the public's attention extreme inefficiencies in our government, especially involved in outdated technology. In one example, Doge highlighted the OPM retirement operation center.
▶ 3:56:39This facility is located in an underground mine that holds over 400 million individual paper documents. It should be come as no surprise that using outdated technologies leads to more mistakes. During the fiscal year 2024, the federal government reported an estimated 162 billion in improper payments. Banks and credit card companies use AI and machine learning to prevent fraud, oftentimes before any money changes hands.
▶ 3:57:08So, I guess I'll ask each witness, do you think the Treasury payment system could use similar technology to lower waste, fraud, and abuse? And I'm talking AI. Yes. In general, yes. I'm not qualified on this particular topic. Well, there's there's a number of of executive orders and and legislative proposals that are aimed at trying to improve Treasury's payment verification services and the data that Treasury is being able to gather in.
▶ 3:57:33But one of the problems with focusing entirely on Treasury, though I do believe Treasury is the right entity for a centralized system, is that Treasury is is making a decision right before a payment is made where we can actually put these technologies upstream within the agencies before an application is approved. because you know many times we're approving people we're approving to shell companies or or you know entities that don't exist.
▶ 3:57:56So if we're using better data across the agencies not just of the treasury but absolutely treasuries modernizing treasury system and getting more data and I'm very supportive of the executive orders that have come out to date and some of the legislative bills a couple more questions coming. Let me ask the last two witnesses. Yes or no? Yes. Uh I'm with Miss Miller that you want to push this upstream. Okay. Do you think the federal government is losing money by not using modern technology including AI and machine learning? That's just a yes or no. It's more complicated.
▶ 3:58:25So you need the digital infrastructure to use AI. So I think we need to first modernize the government IT infrastructure so you'll be able to use The private sector is doing this. So I think the government could too as well. Absolutely. Without question. Yes, I agree. Yes. Especially tax revenue. Okay. Mr. Shaw, as AI becomes more integrated in decision-making systems, are you concerned that these tools might reflect political bias?
▶ 3:58:50Specifically, are today's AI models biased towards leftleaning perspectives, and what implications might that have for public trust or government use? There's a proliferation of AI models now being trained on all sorts of data sets, and hallucinations are a thing, bias are a thing. Um, and we could never really overcome them, um, you know, forever. I think there's going to still be traces of that given the type of technology that they are. But you can build applications that can control for this.
▶ 3:59:19You can absolutely look and and have models checking models checking models and have a a a structure that ensures that everything it decides can be backed up and that can be referenced. And while that won't solve every particular case, um nor can we do that with human beings, I think the models and the AI systems can get very very accurate.
▶ 3:59:41President Biden led in over 1 point well 15 million illegal immigrants into our country and allowed deadly drugs like fentanyl to pour into our communities. In just under six months, President Trump has secured it with daily encounters dropping by 95%. We have seen Department of Homeland Security successfully deploy AI to stop illegal immigration from cameras and sensors along the border to drug detection equipment and ports of entry. However, severe damage has already been done.
▶ 4:00:08There are an untold number of illegal aliens currently residing in our country. M and I apologize if I pronounced your name wrong, Mr. Zer. Do you see any ways we can leverage AI to help facilitate deportations? I I've not followed that one closely, Congressman, but I do know DHS is using AI tools for these purposes. Awesome. Well, thank you for your testimony today, and I yield back. The gentleman yields. I now recognize Miss Presley from Thank you.
▶ 4:00:36Just two weeks ago, Republicans passed a reconciliation bill that would ban all states from regulating AI for 10 years. Uh since uh most did not actually read the bill. They were unaware of that. So, this is a timely hearing um as Republicans are are learning the error of their ways in real time. They're offering the American people up as guinea pigs for corporations to conduct AI experiments with no oversight, no regulation, and and no endorse and no enforcement. Mr. Mr.
▶ 4:01:04Chair, I ask unanimous uh consent to enter into the record a letter by the Massachusetts Joint Committee on Advanced Information Technology, the Internet and Cyber Security for May 30th, 2025, which details the dangers of the Republican moratorum. Unanimous consent without objection. All right. Now, let's talk about why regulating AI matters.
▶ 4:01:31Artificial intelligence reflects the assumptions of those who build it and the priorities of those who use it. And too often those priorities fail to include the safety, the rights, and economic opportunity of black communities and other marginalized groups. In my district, the Massachusetts 7th, we are proud to be a national hub for technology and innovation.
▶ 4:01:51Uh for example, Nor Eastern University Center for Inclusive Computing is leading the charge to make sure that AI opportunities are accessible to all. At the same time, we cannot allow AI to be the latest chapter in America's history of exploiting marginalized groups, namely the black community. The government must invest in an approach rooted in equity that protects the rights of everyone. That is why, Mr.
▶ 4:02:15Chair, I ask unanimous consent to enter into the record this report released last year from Color of Change titled Black Tech Agenda: Advancing Equity and Re-imagining Technology. Without objection. All right. Mr.
▶ 4:02:36Schneider, do you know which government employee or agency or board is responsible for overseeing AI deployment across the executive branch to prevent violations of civil liberties and civil rights? I don't believe there is one. So if this is a test, I just Well, the truth is no one knows. Uh the responsibility of AI civil rights enforcement is not in anyone's job description and that has got to change.
▶ 4:03:05The United States federal government is deploying AI and it's impacting our daily lives. There are more than 2,000 AI use cases across agencies. Right now, there's nothing stopping the Department of Health and Human Services from using AI systems to help decide who receives Medicaid, who receives food assistance and disability benefits.
▶ 4:03:27If an algorithm flags someone incorrectly, a mother could quite literally lose access to her child's medication, or a family could lose food support. There's nothing stopping the Department of Justice from using racially biased algorithms to decide who gets released from prison. AI shouldn't be determining who gets care, who stays in prison, or who can feed their kids without any sense of oversight or recourse.
▶ 4:03:55The government's use of AI cannot be unchecked and unregulated. If we want public to trust the federal government, then we must have transparency. I yield back. here. The gentleoman yields. I now recognize uh Congressman Moscowitz for five Thank you. I thank you uh Mr. Chair.
▶ 4:04:25Uh appreciate the uh waiver on today. You know, obviously this is an important topic uh on on artificial intelligence. I I got to be honest, I definitely want to meet the person uh in the capital who was like, "We're going to have a hearing on intelligence. Let's give that to Chairman Comr." Um but, you know, we we saw some language wind up in a bill that everyone's complaining that, you know, they didn't read.
▶ 4:04:54Remember, they were the ones who had the 72-hour rule. That was their rule. In fact, they cried and demanded that every bill come forward and be given 72 hours to to read a bill. They complained when Democrats were controlled. Meanwhile, they passed this bill in the dead of night. Don't listen to me. That's what Elon Musk is now saying on on Um, yesterday in the Doge subcommittee hearing, Chairman Comr announced new investigations into the Biden administration.
▶ 4:05:23And I thought, of course, this makes total sense, right? We've recently brought back measles and the direwolf and the tariff policies of the 1930s. So, you know, why not resurrect the failed Biden impeachment? I I don't want to go down memory lane uh about what happened last year, but you know, they said they would call for impeachment. That's what they said. And they never did.
▶ 4:05:48After hundreds of interviews, fundraising emails, and speeches, and lying to their base, they never called for impeachment. So, I want to do the don't listen to what they say. Watch what they do. And this is, of course, all a distraction, right? They said they would lower food costs. They said they would take us into the golden age. They said they would end the war in Ukraine and Gaza. They said they would they wouldn't touch Medicaid. They said they would lower interest rates.
▶ 4:06:18They said they would lower our debt. They said they would release the Epstein files. Remember that? This is not one of the ones that Pam gave out. I made my own. It's not hard. Right. And the biggest one, the biggest one, my favorite. They said they would make government more efficient. Doge E stood for efficiency. Name one department, one government service.
▶ 4:06:45anything that the government does that they made more efficient. Certainly not the Newark airport. Definitely not FEMA. We got administrator who's finding out about hurricane seasons. A little late. Uh total failure. No new technology, no new procurement rules. Procurement's a big problem in government. You got different different agencies, different departments making different procurements, buying technology that can't communicate with each other.
▶ 4:07:13By the way, we learned that after 911 in in law enforcement and we still have not fixed that problem. Uh, no new streamlined processes, zero. Okay? And so, look, sometimes people are visual learners, right? They're visual learners. And so, look, this is what this is what the Republicans promised the American people. They promised them this. Okay? This was the Willy Wonka thing in in in London. This is what they promised them.
▶ 4:07:42This is what it was supposed to look like, right? The golden age. And that's not what they've delivered. What they've delivered is this. This is what they have delivered to the American people. This is what is left of the Doge effort that she got to keep her job. Uh this is what's left. Uh and so they're very good at telling the American people what they want to do, what they say they're going to do. But the American people should start watching what they're actually doing or what they've done or what they've not done.
▶ 4:08:13And so listen, fine. Bring in the Biden people again. We'll go through this whole thing. Tens of millions of dollars wasted in the last Congress. We'll do it all again. Right back to our old tricks. But of course, they want to bury them in the basement again. It's being proposed that, oh, we'll take their depositions, bury them in the basement, then they'll leak the transcripts. You know, they tell you, "Well, we want to shine transparency on the end of the Biden administration.
▶ 4:08:40We want to get to the truth." But they want to hold these meetings in secret, not in front of the cameras, not in front of the American people, in the bottom of a basement. By the way, I noticed that the oversight hearings are now in the bottom of a basement. Ironic after all the basement talk last Congress. But they they just want to suppress information. and they want to do selective leaks and they want to distract that this is the least productive Congress in 70 years. So listen, it's fine. We'll do it all again. Okay?
▶ 4:09:11Won't help people at the grocery store. Won't help people save their healthcare. It will do none of that. But it will get you on OW own and Fox News and raise money. Thank you. I now recognize uh Congresswoman Tran for five minutes. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate you allowing me to be part of this important conversation. Over on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which is where I usually serve, we have a lot of conversations about technology.
▶ 4:09:39And one thing is always clear, data is at the heart of AI. That's why I believe that any serious discussion about AI has to start with a conversation about privacy. And that's what I'm here to do today, to sound the alarm about a deeply troubling trend. our own government's growing appetite for Americans personal data. Let me just give you an example, a hypothetical of course, but not a far-fetched one. Sarah is a typical American woman.
▶ 4:10:08She pays her taxes, owns a gun legally, and is raising her daughter Emma on her own. She and Emma rely on Medicaid to get the health care that they need. One day, Sarah shares a post on Facebook. She's concerned about something the president said about firearms and she posts so. But in Washington, an AI powered monitoring system flags her post.
▶ 4:10:32A political appointee digs into her personal data and sends emails to agency heads urging them to take action against her. Within days, Sarah's life falls apart. The IRS audits her and claims she owes thousands. Emma's doctor says her Medicaid isn't active anymore, and now Sarah has to pay out of pocket. Now, to be clear, this story is made up, but it's not science fiction. It's an alarm. It's a warning. Mr.
▶ 4:10:58Schneider, you talked in your testimony about coercion as an adversarial use of data. What kinds of coercion could bad actors inside the government use if they had detailed profiles on every American? I would think of it as selective investigation. I mean the government has enormous powers to investigate people and the question is who they choose to investigate.
▶ 4:11:22You know I mean the there's a famous book from many years ago called three felonies a day that we in our normal lives commit three felonies a day because there just so many rules and we don't know them. And given so given things like that who you choose to enforce the law on matters.
▶ 4:11:39So this data can be used to select people whom to investigate, people whom to charge and this could be used selectively by any regime, even not the US, any country that wants to do this. Yep. Well, unfortunately, this isn't just a hypo hypothetical trend. It's already happening. Under the Trump administration, Doge aggressively collected sensitive data across agencies, breaking down firewalls that are supposed to protect us.
▶ 4:12:08Then came the executive order directing agencies to eliminate information silos, basically to share and pull that data. And just last week, we learned that Palunteer, a Silicon Valley company known for building surveillance tools, is being hired to build AI powered profiles on every American using the data that Doge collected. It's hard to overstate how dangerous this is. Mr.
▶ 4:12:35Schneider, are you worried that once this data is centralized, future administrations, no matter their party, could weaponize it? I mean, are we on the verge of opening Pandora's box here? I don't know if Pandora's box has been opened years ago, but certainly giving this power to a government is something that feels very unamerican. I mean, there are reasons why this data was siloed. There are reasons why we didn't have these powers. I mean, you can imagine humans doing this well before AI, but we chose not to.
▶ 4:13:04Uh so AI can certainly make this more efficient but yes this is this is power in the hands of a human who wants to wield it for ill can do that very very efficiently. Thank you. We we need a national reckoning on privacy. That means strong oversight of this administration and its tech partners and real legislation to protect Americans rights. You know, I've spent the past three months talking with civil liberties groups, privacy experts, and people across the country, and the one thing is clear.
▶ 4:13:34We need stronger privacy laws. I believe that we can protect people's data and modernize government to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse. These goals are not at odds. They're linked. So, if you're listening and you're concerned about what's happening about big tech, about government overreach, about your family's privacy, call my office. Let's have a national conversation. Let's protect the freedom that our founders fought for and the privacy we all deserve.
▶ 4:14:02And one last thing I just wanted to mention because over the course of this hearing, the chair has suggested that no one on the other side of the aisle called attention to the harms of the Republicans's 10-year ban on state AI regula regulations. That's patently false. We had robust debate on the Energy and Commerce Committee with several Democratic members, myself included, calling attention to this provision during and after our 26-hour markup. In fact, Democrats offered an amendment to strike the language entirely. So, Mr.
▶ 4:14:32Chair, I ask unanimous consent to enter into the records of the vote without objection. Without objection. Thank you. I yield back. In closing, I want to thank the panelists once again for their testimony today. With that and without objection, all members will have five legislative days within uh which to submit materials and to submit additional written questions for the witnesses which will be forwarded to the witnesses for their response.
▶ 4:15:00If there are no if there is no further business without objection, the committee stands adjourned. You guys want to