Here is an interesting piece by someone who is running for office, but it's about some research the government has been doing, should be doing, and is ignoring.
--Kim
I found out something about Congress this week that blew my mind.
I've been talking about how we need an AI task force in Congress for a few weeks now, so I started to do the research on how to make that happen. What I found was a 273-page report.
Turns out the House built a bipartisan AI task force in early 2024 - 24 members from both parties, a year of hearings, and real experts at the table. They put out 66 findings and 85 recommendations in December 2024.
I didn't even know it existed. And here's why - the second the report came out, the task force dissolved. That was the whole design. Study everything for one year, publish - and then end it as if the issue were solved.
A year and a half later, Congress has passed exactly one AI law - a ban on posting deepfake porn of someone without their consent. That law is good and we needed it. But it's the only one. Nothing on jobs, nothing on privacy rights, nothing on data centers - nothing on your power bill.
Meanwhile, states wrote about 150 AI laws in 2025 and filed over 1,500 more this year. You may remember that the White House signed an executive order in December claiming the power to knock those state laws down - and set up a Justice Department team to sue states over them.
This spring, that team went to court to help kill Colorado's AI law - the federal government suing a state on a tech company's behalf. Days later, the law was put on hold while the fight plays out.
So right now, AI is already in the middle of your life - whether you invited it or not. It reads your insurance claim before a human ever sees it - and sometimes no human ever does. It screens your job application and decides if a person even looks at your resume. It helps set the price you pay for a plane ticket - and the data centers that run it are pushing up electric bills in many states that host them. And the rules for all of that are being written by governors, the DOJ, and corporate legal teams. The one branch of government built to write laws is watching from the stands.
Then I found the part that made me roll my eyes. This isn't the first time Congress has done this to itself. From 1972 to 1995, Congress had its own science shop - the Office of Technology Assessment. Its nonpartisan experts wrote about 750 studies telling members what a technology actually did before they voted on it. Newt Gingrich cut its funding in 1995 to shrink Congress's own staff. They never even repealed the law that created it - they just stopped paying the experts.
Guess who moved into those empty chairs - Lobbyists.
Thirty years later, members of Congress now vote on AI based on whatever a tech company's government-affairs guy told them over lunch. Which makes sense - cause a Congress that can't understand technology is a Congress that can be told what to think about it - and there's a whole industry happy to do it.
(Remember what I've said about how lobbyists should have to put their names on the laws they help write? This is a perfect example of why.)
So here's my fix - and it's almost embarrassingly simple: bring the task force back and make it permanent. Its job should be to watch this technology - everything about it. And theorize the benefits and the negative effects - and stop the harms BEFORE they happen.
Oh - and Congress should start funding the OTA (Science Panel) again while they're at it. The law is still on the books. It needs a budget line - not a new act of Congress.
If elected, I'll make it my business to push for both of these things.
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