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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Tonight is the first debate night for the mayoral candidates in the Democratic primary in New York City. It's at seven o'clock tonight on Channel 4. We're doing our WNYC New York one, the city debate that I'll be one of the questioners in next week, but we're definitely going to pay attention to the Channel 4 debate tonight to help inform what we do next week. Just letting you know about that as an important day in New York City democracy today.

We're going to preview that debate and talk about the state of the race later this hour with our political reporter, Liz Kim. That's coming up. In Washington, as the Trump legislation he calls the big beautiful bill, is being debated in the Senate now, some strange bedfellows are emerging to oppose parts of it. There's more of a spotlight being put on some things with potential implications for democracy and for people's jobs relating to artificial intelligence, for example, that are not really budget items and that are going to be debated, I think, more than they have been and need to be debated more than they have been.

Most of the focus, like we mentioned yesterday, has been on Medicaid. That's important, but it's not the only thing we need to talk about. Maybe you heard that Elon Musk now calls the whole bill an abomination. Well, House Minority Leader and Brooklyn Democrat Hakeem Jeffries agrees.

Hakeem Jeffries: Breaking news, Elon Musk and I agree with each other. The GOP tax scam is a disgusting abomination.

Brian Lehrer: Strange bedfellows, Hakeem Jeffries and Elon Musk. Jefferies came back to that language, that term again, a few seconds later, but with specifics.

Hakeem Jeffries: The GOP tax scam is a disgusting abomination. It rips health care away from up to 14 million people, everyday Americans across the country. Hospitals will close, nursing homes will shut down, and yes, people will die.

Brian Lehrer: Now, to be clear, Musk and Jeffries do not share the same reasons for viewing this budget bill as an abomination, but the knives are out from various camps. We'll talk about some of the specifics now, and as I said, take a somewhat closer look at several provisions of the bill that are not about spending but about policy, with Democrats saying democracy is at stake. There's the provision that came up briefly on yesterday's show, a 10-year ban on the ability of states to regulate artificial intelligence. As you'll hear, there are other strange bedfellows opposing that.

With me now are two journalists covering all this. Ursula Perano, Senate reporter at the news site NOTUS, N-O-T-U-S, and Matt Brown, national politics reporter for the Associated Press. Ursula and Matt, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Ursula Perano: Thanks for having us.

Matt Brown: Thanks. Great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Ursula, you have an article with the headline, wait, I'm getting it out, Elon Musk knifed the reconciliation bill. Senate Republicans are taking note. How did Elon Musk knife the reconciliation bill?

Ursula Perano: It was funny, that tweet that came out yesterday, or I should say post on X, rather, from Elon Musk calling the bill a disgusting abomination. Actually came while Senate Republicans were in their weekly closed-door lunch to discuss this bill. They were having a deep dive conversation over tax provisions, and as they came out, they were met with, of course, swarms of reporters saying, "What do you think about this tweet?"

What we heard is that chatter of the tweets spread around the room rather quickly, but we got a lot of senators who didn't want to comment or said Musk is entitled to his opinion, or they'll be interested to see what Trump says on the matter. At the end of the day, the Senate Republicans themselves can't necessarily agree just yet on what sort of policy and provisions they're trying to see in this bill, really warring factions over spending cuts versus preserving social programs like Medicaid and food assistance.

Having this outside voice who is close to the president, has a large conservative following, Musk himself say that he doesn't like the bill either, that he thinks it's a garbage bill and needs to go back to the drawing board, certainly doesn't help this conservative faction find compromise.

Brian Lehrer: Matt, you heard the Hakeem Jeffries clips there. He picked up on Elon Musk's language, but his reasons were not what Ursula was just laying out that conservatives object to, right?

Matt Brown: Yes. It's been interesting watching both Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries run with the Musk post, while obviously very strongly disagreeing with what Musk wants, which would actually be much deeper cuts to social programs like Medicaid and even potentially Medicare in Musk's view. What the Democrats have been highlighting is actually those exact cuts that the GOP has already taken and the fact that the GOP in its current form in this bill would be expanding the federal deficit as many different analyses of the budget have predicted so far and also would be raising the debt ceiling, which is something that has divided Republicans so far and that Democrats are happy to watch the squabbling over.

It's something, though, that Democrats, while they don't have the votes in either chamber to stop this bill, are hoping that the different divisions inside of the GOP will cause it to not be able to pass, or at least be limited from the changes that folks like Musk and some of the more ardent conservatives in Congress are hoping to see.

Brian Lehrer: Ursula, to the second half of your headline, Senate Republicans are taking note, do they care what Elon Musk thinks, especially now that he's out of government and that he's been so unpopular around the country and in so many polls?

Ursula Perano: It depends which senators you're talking to. Some of the conservatives who are against this bill for things like spending levels definitely did take note. We saw-- I believe it was Ron Johnson came out yesterday. He is one of the Senate Republicans who has been adamantly against this bill, saying it does nothing to help the federal debt and deficit, and saying that it needs to change. He said, "I hope people do pay attention to what Elon Musk has to say and what I have to say." It's emboldening them to keep speaking out further.

There is a significant faction of the caucus or conference who brushed it off, isn't necessarily taking his word as gospel. At the end of the day, the Senate is perhaps, I would say, less easily influenced by outside voices than even the House. We see Trump's favor whenever he comes to get involved, have a little more influence over members of the House and the Senate on average, but they do have to figure this out within the next few weeks. Every wrench thrown into this is just absolutely unwelcome from Senate GOP leadership.

Brian Lehrer: Asked about Musk's criticism and strong language, House Speaker Johnson yesterday before a group of reporters, defended the bill in various ways, such as this.

House Speaker Johnson: Not only all of our priorities, all the promises we made on the campaign trail, all the America First agenda wrapped into this legislation. We're also achieving-- The top line on this is two very important things. We're making permanent a massive tax cut, and we are making a massive reduction in spending.

Brian Lehrer: Matt, does it matter what happens in the House at this point? They already passed the bill, but if the Senate, and like I've been saying, we're going to get to some of the non budgetary provisions in the bill, like on AI, like on guns, other things, if the Senate rejects some of those things or doesn't want to cut taxes as much or doesn't want to cut spending as much, does it go back to the House? What's Mike Johnson looking at?

Matt Brown: It's very likely that the Senate is going to make some notable changes to this bill, obviously by taking out a lot of the different policy provisions, which would then send it back to the House for a final patch up so that both chambers would be aligned before the final text would head to Donald Trump's desk. That said, the Senate has made clear that they are not going to take political changes to the bill that would make it impossible for this to be able to get through Johnson's very, very narrow House majority.

There's already been a lot of concessions that have been made in dealmaking that was arduously done in the House to make sure that all different parts of the GOP caucus would be able to get on board with this, which means any of the changes that the Republican senators make is something that would have to be stomached by both the House moderates who are going to be in a lot of vulnerable seats come 2026, as well as some of the most ardent conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus.

Brian Lehrer: Ursula, if Musk was criticizing the bill for not cutting spending enough, therefore increasing the deficit, did he say anything about the tax cuts? Obviously, that's what the Democrats are going to say or are saying. The reason the deficit would go up so much under this plan, while kicking people off their health insurance and other things, is so they can give tax cuts to billionaires. Obviously, Elon Musk, as most of our listeners know, is the richest man in the world by all accounts. Did Musk himself say anything about the tax cuts, or does he think they're all justified and he just left that out of his critique?

Ursula Perano: Well, in his critique, he called it a pork-filled bill, but there definitely are questions about whether he would be eyeing perhaps an extension of electric vehicle tax credits, something that this bill is not currently doing. That, obviously, because Elon Musk owns Tesla. There are questions of whether he would personally be invested in that issue and have objection to the bill for that reason.

Musk himself spoke in broad strokes yesterday, posting these on Twitter, just broadly saying, "I don't like it," but we do hear a lot of lawmakers diving in very specifically to provisions they don't like, provisions they don't think will go through the so called Byrd bath that will be stripped out for procedural reasons or are believed to be stripped out for procedural reasons. Like I said earlier, I'm curious to see how much Senate Republicans actually respond to Musk or if there's a sizable enough mass to take what he said and enact substantive change within the bill.

Brian Lehrer: Matt, NBC News had a graphic on MSNBC this morning called Elon Musk's issues with the Trump administration, and they certainly are not all about cutting spending not enough. I guess this is NBC's take on what his real issues are with the Trump administration. It says, one, electric vehicle tax credits cut from the spending bill, two, denied ability to stay longer as a special government employee, three, denied use of the Starlink satellite system for air traffic control, and four, Trump pulled the nomination of Jared Isaacman, that's a person close to Musk, to be NASA administrator.

Do you have any reporting on the second one of those, denied ability to stay longer as a special government employee? Did Trump, who I think has tried to mostly say very nice things about Elon Musk, push him out, or did Musk just take too much of a hit in the stock price of Tesla and things like that, and leave on his own? How much do you know about that?

Matt Brown: Look, it would be difficult to speculate on the perspective or opinions of Elon Musk's changing opinions on every single hour of the day. What I can say from our reporting is that this is a man who has significant business interests in front of the federal government, and throughout his career has been deeply intertwined with that federal government and over the past couple months has taken with the so called Department of Government deficiency, many different folks who've been close to him throughout his business associates and other ventures throughout the federal government on a joyride through sensitive systems inside the Treasury Department to obviously the State Department and USAID to throughout lobbying in Congress, and has really made the case to the White House himself.

His interests, and oftentimes that he's argued, are in the interest of the country, but also many would argue are in the interest of himself and his businesses need to be taken more seriously and need to be prioritized. This has obviously caused a lot of consternation both on Capitol Hill, conversations that I've had with people on both sides of the aisle, as well as inside of these federal agencies, and at times the White House.

For that reason, Musk has caused sometimes a headache for Trump, and Trump has actually at times even indicated that himself in reserved ways. Given all of that, those are the dynamics that have gone on since Elon has exited. We don't necessarily know what the exact conditions were that pushed him out, but we do know that this was a political dynamic that was occupying a significant portion of the White House's attention every single day and, in fact, its entire policy agenda. Musk says that he's stepping back from politics for now, but the question will be just for how long.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we invite your phone calls. Keep pointing to pieces of this bill because some of you get in the weeds on this, we know, and you can always help us report this story, report any story with your phone calls. Those of you who are paying attention, in addition to obviously what we and our guests as professional journalists are looking at, we invite you to keep pointing to pieces of this bill as you did yesterday in some of your calls and texts that you think might not be getting noticed enough, including the pieces that are not budget items per se.

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text for our Washington journalist guests, Ursula Perano, Senate reporter at the news site NOTUS, and Matt Brown, national politics reporter for the Associated Press. All right, Ursula, let's start talking about things that are not budget items in this bill. You have an article that names four. We'll go down them one by one, and then we'll linger a bit on the one about AI. You write, there's a provision in the House bill banning states from self-regulating artificial intelligence. There's also a provision that would bar judges from enforcing contempt citations on individuals who fail to abide by court orders. That's a democracy question.

There's another proposal you write that would require federal agency rules to be approved by Congress before going into effect. That sounds wonky, but it might have wide-ranging effects on all kinds of, especially more Democratic priorities. Then you write, perhaps most notably for House Republicans, there's language in the bill on the suppressor tax, a tax on the purchase of firearms suppressors, also known as silencers. The reconciliation bill would remove that tax. Ursula, can you talk about that one first, the suppressor tax, and what this bill would do, and who wants that and why?

Ursula Perano: Yes. The suppressor tax, the question around it, it's a two-pronged proposal in the bill. There is language in the bill to remove the tax itself, which I believe is a $200 fee on the purchase of suppressors, also known as silencers for firearms, but with that, they are also proposing to remove registration for silencers, which that has bigger question marks around whether that is strictly related enough to the federal budget to qualify to be in this bill.

A reminder for folks that reconciliation requires that all provisions in the bill be strictly related to the federal budget. It has to go before the parliamentarian, and if lawmakers can't make a strong enough argument as to why a given part of the bill has significant budgetary impact, typically it gets stripped out. There are really big questions around whether that registration element that House Republicans are also trying to strip out regarding silencers would make it through the so-called Byrd bath with the parliamentarian.

House Republicans say that this suppressor tax is tied to the registration and that the registration was only created to track down people to tax and that they are so closely intertwined, but of course, we can expect that Democrats are going to be pushing to say, what does a silencer registration or registry have to do with the federal budget? The tax a little more clear-cut, but the registration itself, that's going to be one that we can definitely expect people to be pushing back on or to be trying to get stripped out of this bill.

Brian Lehrer: Matt, anything on that? Because what Ursula calls the Byrd bath, which again is a test for anything in a budget bill to see if it's not actually a budget item, then it gets stripped out of the bill, at least the bill's ability to get passed by just 50 or 51 votes. Anything that's not a budget item requires the 60-vote margin, which would allow Democrats to successfully filibuster them. They're trying to stuff some things that aren't clearly budget items into this bill and hope the Senate parliamentarian, under the so-called Byrd rule for the late Senator Robert Byrd, hopes that it passes muster there.

I've heard Democrats say about this particular provision, even though it is technically a tax provision, it would remove that tax on suppressors, silencers, saying, "Wait, we're giving tax breaks to silencers while we're kicking people off Medicaid?" Have you heard that critique?

Matt Brown: I've definitely heard that critique from Democrats in the hallways. It's one of the things that Senate Democrats are very comfortable highlighting in this bill. I think that the dynamic that you just outlined as well shows some of the differences between the House and the Senate here, where different House lawmakers have been behind the scenes pushing for various provisions that they're interested in to be as part of this sweeping package because on their side, they can include basically whatever they want in the package before it comes to the Senate.

A lot of GOP lawmakers have been very clear that different provisions of the bill aren't going to make it through Senate procedure, and they tend to have a lot more fealty to their own chambers rules and regulations, but on a policy like this, you can actually see a fight at times where if you can reasonably make the case that it could get through the Senate parliamentarian, sometimes lawmakers will say, "Oh, well, I'm actually going to be on board with that, or flex the rules a little bit."

That's been the conversation that you've been seeing around provisions like this and other ones in the bill where if it has any meaningful effect on the budget whatsoever, if you can even make somewhat of a case for it, some of the lawmakers are willing to put their necks out a little bit more and see if they would be able to reasonably defend some of these provisions, but a lot of GOP lawmakers have made clear that a lot of them just aren't absolutely not going to make it through.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, Matt, on the budgetary aspects of the bill, listener writes in a text message, "I thought that to use the reconciliation process in the Senate, a bill wasn't allowed to add to the deficit. How are the Republicans pushing this through?" Do you know if the premise of that question is accurate, reconciliation bill, meaning it only needs the 50 votes, plus the vice president is not allowed to increase the deficit?

Matt Brown: This is the weird part about this bill, where it is a reconciliation package, but I don't think formally at the moment, because it is just addressing the budget. The proper rules for this get wonky, but because of some of the Senate procedures that the GOP is going through, we, for instance, at the AP are being very careful about not calling it a full reconciliation package. It is a bill at the moment, and that is how they're passing this bill.

Ursula Perano: Interesting.

Matt Brown: I won't bore you with the details.

Brian Lehrer: Does that present the Democrats an additional opportunity to sink it with a filibuster?

Matt Brown: It does not present the Democrats at the moment with the opportunity to sink it with a filibuster, given the way that the GOP is going through with it. It does mean that if the GOP fumbles at any point, then the Democrats would-- for instance, their time frame on the debt ceiling or other disagreements, it would give the Democrats maybe some greater leverage. The real question here is the clock; can the Democrats beat this, not the question of the filibuster?

Brian Lehrer: Ursula, let's go to another of the provisions you listed in your article that is not a budgetary item, the one that would bar judges from enforcing contempt citations on individuals who fail to abide by court orders. That's an interesting category: individuals who fail to abide by court orders. Does anybody with the initials DJT come to mind for who they might have in mind by putting that in there?

Ursula Perano: Yes. This is one of those provisions that folks in the Senate or folks who have gone through this process before, working with the parliamentarian, pointed out to me as a very, very large question mark whether this gets through or something, people are outright doubting. This is seen as something to try and rein in the judiciary that allies of President Trump believe has gone against him for too long. It is, I would say, a little bit more of a political provision at this point in time. I don't even think many Republicans on the Hill would disagree with me on that.

There are, of course, questions about what does this have to do with the budget? How are you guys going to argue that this is related to the budget when we're talking about the enforcement of contempt citations for folks who don't abide by orders from a judge or court orders? This is another one that I do think we're going to see particularly challenged by Democrats throughout this process.

Brian Lehrer: This is particularly relevant to the democracy versus autocracy or authoritarianism, I've only said that word a zillion times in the past few months, issues that Democrats and other people raise. If there's already this battle between how much power the president can exert unilaterally and how much he can be stopped by the courts when courts think that he's going too far, breaking the law, or being unconstitutional in some of the things that he's doing. There's already a limited ability of courts to enforce their rulings. This is one of the few powers that they have to enforce, contempt citations.

Now, I don't know how they enforce contempt citations. I guess there are various ways. There can be fines, there can be imprisonment, correct me if I'm wrong, in circumstances that are seen as extreme, repeated violations of court orders that are judged by the judges to be violations, willful violations of court orders. That's why they use the word contempt. This would make it even harder to enforce, particularly on Trump as the salient current example here, actually enforce a contempt citation. Is that what we're talking about?

Ursula Perano: Yes. I'm sure there is a court reporter out there that could explain it better than I, but my understanding is that's really what it is. It's reining in the enforcement ability. Of course, Trump himself and many of his allies have gone through the court system in recent years, not as much, of course, in the past few months, but in the previous administration, many of them were going through the process of either being indicted or pursued for legal questions that remained from, I would say, in particular, the 2020 election. They have a little bit of a bone to pick with the process, and I think we're seeing the legislative ramifications of people trying to address that now that they are back in power.

Brian Lehrer: Kathleen in Astoria is calling about this provision. Kathleen, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Kathleen: Hi, thank you for taking my call. It seems like the wording of Section 703.02 says that the judiciary is not allowed to spend money on enforcing the contempt citation. The piece of paper it would be written on and spent or whatever, they're not allowed to spend money on it. That's how they get it into a budget bill, and I'm wondering if that could have possibly worked.

Brian Lehrer: Ursula, can you answer that question?

Ursula Perano: Yes. I would imagine that's part of the argument of how it was written. This is, I shouldn't speculate, but a little speculative. Everyone who writes these bills tries to bake, in a way, immediately off the bat to try and have the argument made for budgetary understanding, whatever it may be, having some sort of spending relation to it. We'll see this with a lot of these provisions where if you dive deep into this massive, very long bill with a ton of intricate policy provisions, there will usually be, just speaking broadly, a little bit of a spending relationship here, some sort of stretch to try and make it have a monetary figure or a dollar figure that people can refer to.

I would imagine that that will be part of the argument on Republican side, but it's up to the parliamentarian at the end of the day. She is not a legal authority, Senate Republicans can always overrule her, but Senate GOP leadership has been adamant that they do not want to do that. If the parliamentarian comes down and says she doesn't think that argument is strict enough or closely aligned enough to the federal budget and that it should be stripped out, at least the signals that Senate Republican leadership is giving right now is that they would abide by her suggestions.

Brian Lehrer: One of the other proposals that your article mentioned that I mentioned on the list is the one that would require federal agency rules to be approved by Congress before going into effect. Like I said, that sounds kind of wonky, but the implications could be vast. This is part of dismantling what they call the administrative state. This is aimed at things like environmental rules, where if there's a Clean Water Act, for example, the particular rules that the EPA makes to enforce the standards set in the Clean Water Act now don't have to go rule by rule through Congress.

They're trying to set it up here so that every rule that every agency makes to implement a law that's been passed by Congress, and I think they have environmental laws in mind, especially, every rule would have to go back and be debated as if it was a separate bill. Matt, are you on this? Am I interpreting this right?

Matt Brown: Yes, that's basically correct. I should note that this is really building on several court rulings that we've seen in recent years from the Supreme Court and others that has limited the scope of rulemaking capacity for different federal agencies, as you said, like the Environmental Protection Agency and other environmental oversight boards. In that way, this is Republicans signaling the party's broader agenda with the conservative movement, which is that Congress should be the sole place that can do these types of regulations, that there shouldn't be any form of administrative expertise in most cases that would be being able to do this rulemaking in its own judgment and capacity.

That is something that has been a long-standing opinion of the conservative movement in this country, and this is another way that that's manifesting through legislation now, even though for the past couple of years we've seen that mostly manifest through the courts and in court rulings.

Brian Lehrer: Han in Brooklyn has another non-budgetary provision that we haven't mentioned yet. Han, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in and adding to this list.

Han: Hi, thanks for having me. As a lot of transgender activists and just transgender people have been saying, the battle about gender-affirming care access for minors was going to be really easy to lop off the end of the sentence for minors. On May 21st, that's exactly what happened. They had gender gender-affirming care ban for minors in this bill, and then someone from Texas, I can't remember his name, just cut off the end for minors. This bill proposes just a complete barring of access to gender affirming care on Medicaid, which could affect up to 140,000 transgender people.

Brian Lehrer: Ursula, we've mentioned this briefly on the show before, but I think Han has it right. You can tell me if you read that exact provision in the bill, but where so much of the focus in the anti trans language has been on not allowing or at least not providing Medicaid funding, but in general, having states ban gender affirming care for minors under the premise that they're not old enough to really make this decision on their own and their parents shouldn't be making these decisions for them.

So much for parents' rights, but that's been the focus, is don't do this to a kid until they're old enough to have a better sense of who they are and whether they really want to go through some kind of gender transition. Now, because they're really just anti trans and wants to otherize and delegitimize those people altogether as much as they can, the bill would in fact remove the eligibility for Medicaid for adults as well who want gender affirming medical care. Have you seen it?

Ursula Perano: I have seen it. I haven't dived into it as deeply as some others may have, but I have seen that headline. I think that this is one of the tricky things about, or the reason rather that party majorities in Congress, like reconciliation, is that this is the type of policy provision that if it did have to go through a 60 vote threshold and get past a filibuster, particularly in the Senate, this wouldn't likely get the necessary 60 votes because I'm sure Democrats would have questions about it. Who knows, maybe there would be, at this point, seven Democrats that would step over and be willing to vote for it, but it would be a very partisan language in the bill.

Whenever Republicans do have this upper hand and this limited use opportunity to pass legislation through without needing support from the minority party, in this case Democrats, they do jam through a lot of hyper-partisan policy issues that wouldn't otherwise be able to pass. Of course, there are a lot of questions about what the health care provision, Medicaid provisions in this bill, are actually going to look like at the end of it.

The Senate itself is highly negotiating that section of the bill with very different factions of the conference at odds on what they want to see in, but at the end of the day, Republicans do have the ability, so long as they get 51 votes in the upper chamber, to at least pass a bill and send it back to the House. There will be some hyper-conservative policy priorities that do make it in.

Brian Lehrer: Once again, Han, thank you for your call on that one. When we come back from a break, we will look specifically at that provision in the bill that we mentioned earlier that would ban states from regulating AI for the next 10 years, and some of the strange bedfellows lining up to oppose that. You'll be surprised, maybe by whose clip we're going to play. Coming right up.

[MUSIC - Marden Hill: Hijack]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we're trying to perform a service here on national politics by focusing specifically on items in the so-called big beautiful budget bill that are not budgetary items, but policy items that aren't getting as much coverage as some of the things that are budgetary. We're spotlighting these with Ursula Perano, Senate reporter at the news site NOTUS, and Matt Brown, national politics reporter for the Associated Press. Matt, you have a whole article on this AI-related provision headline, House Republicans include a 10-year ban on US states regulating AI, "big beautiful bill". What kind of a ban? What are they looking at?

Matt Brown: Brian, it's just as simple as you just said, the ban would basically be that no state in the union could enact any policy that would regulate in any way anything that could be reasonably construed as an artificial intelligence or machine learning system. That would be a sweeping and transformative policy.

If it was enacted, it would last for the entirety of the reconciliation packages duration, so 10 years, and would make it so that only Congress would have the ability to regulate AI in a meaningful way, which is something that the AI industry has celebrated and that many folks, including state lawmakers in New York, California, Texas and Florida have denounced and technologists and digital rights advocates have expressed concern about.

Brian Lehrer: You wrote it would be a major boon to the AI industry, which has lobbied for uniform and light-touch regulation as tech firms develop a technology they promise will transform society. Why does the AI industry have Congress's ear? Is it as simple as they make a lot of campaign donations?

Matt Brown: It was interesting. When Sam Altman was on the Hill recently, he spoke to senators about this exact issue and made clear that he did not think that a "patchwork" of regulations would be good for the AI industry. Senators seemed very, very eager on both sides of the aisle to buy into that argument because for reasons that you could say yes, the AI industry has been lobbying recently aggressively in Washington and has really become one of the new forces that lawmakers are paying attention to, but also because the AI is currently playing to a lot of what senators have traditionally believed in.

They're arguing on national security purposes and economic growth, and things that both Democrats and Republicans find difficult to argue against if the AI industry is able to deliver. Now, the thing that Altman and other executives who have been speaking with lawmakers have said is that they can only deliver on all of those things if they're absolutely unimpeded or at least given clear regulations that would span the entire country, as opposed to California and New York coming up with their own digital bills of rights versus what Texas and Florida want to do in terms of regulating AI. That is the dilemma that is now facing lawmakers, and it's something that the House GOP decided to take into their own hands.

Brian Lehrer: This reminds me of a Republican priority, something that they're trying to do now. I think they have the state of California in court over this, trying to stop California from continuing to impose its own emission standards largely on cars, because California is such a big market that then it drives the way cars are manufactured nationally. It's just coming from one state, and the automakers don't want to have to deal with that patchwork and manufacture different kinds of cars for different kinds of states.

Many Republicans, and you say some Democrats, are looking at that kind of standard for AI regulation. Here comes the strange bedfellows. Listeners, see if you recognize this voice of a certain member of Congress from Georgia who's opposing this provision.

Marjorie Taylor Greene: I never want to see a situation where state rights are stripped away. That's exactly what it says in that bill text: that it would take away states' rights to regulate or make laws against AI for 10 years. I think that's pretty terrifying. We don't know what AI is going to be capable of within one year. We don't know what it will be capable of in 5 years, let alone 10 years. I think we have to protect states' rights to be able to regulate and make laws that they need to make for their states.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, that was Marjorie Taylor Greene. Ursula, are there strange bedfellows lining up against this AI provision per your reporting?

Ursula Perano: Yes. It was interesting. Marjorie Taylor Greene put out a tweet yesterday saying, "Full transparency, I didn't get this part of the bill or didn't look at this part of the bill too closely, and I'm against it." She is in alignment with a lot of, I would say, AI allies on that part of the bill, and I think there's just a wide, wide understanding in the Senate that that section of the bill is unlikely to get through the parliamentarian process.

I don't even know that it's necessarily partisan. It's just a resigned understanding from folks I've been talking to, and again, folks who have gone through these legislative reviews on previous reconciliation bills, that people do not think this one is necessarily going to survive. I don't know if there's a way they could maybe tweak it or try and do something on AI. One former staffer I was talking to who's gone through this process before said they see provisions like this as industry sweeteners to where folks can go and tell people, "We tried to do something on this, we tried to get something in the bill to address XYZ issue," knowing that it might not survive.

Some folks are looking at this provision from that perspective, but there is a wide, wide understanding that this is going to be one of the most difficult provisions to actually have survived through that legislative review process.

Brian Lehrer: That admission that you referred to by Congresswoman Greene, that she didn't even know about this provision when she voted for the bill in the House before it went to the Senate, that's a perennial. Some of these huge budget bills and huge other kinds of bills have so much in them, and they get jammed through at the last minute with the final things that get added in that some members of Congress, this happens in state legislatures too, don't even really know what they're voting for. They don't know every piece of what they're voting for until after they voted for it, and critics start to read it and journalists start to read it and bring out some of the details.

That's exactly why we are doing this segment on things that are not budget items in this so-called budget bill. Matt, can you describe, because you have an article on this with one of your colleagues from AP, who's specifically a tech reporter, how are states starting or hoping to regulate AI that the industry is hoping to stave off, if you have anything specific?

Matt Brown: Absolutely. Obviously, this is a space that the technology that's promising to transform human civilization. A lot of people have ideas about how we should be regulating it. For instance, California proposed one of the most sweeping AI regulations in the country that Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed and opposed that would have given certain requirements for transparency into how these systems are developed and also make it so that certain content on the systems is not going to-- the algorithm is not going to be used in any way that would cause bias or discrimination.

Those tend to be the things that Democrats have been most concerned about in states like Massachusetts. Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey was just on the Senate floor yesterday arguing for digital equity and transparency in how these systems are developed so that they won't be used for any dangerous means. On the flip side, Republican states like Texas, Georgia, and Florida have been very, very interested in content moderation. They see this as the next silo in debates over free speech and what conservatives can and can't say or can and can't do online.

There's been accusations from Sam Altman's OpenAI to Google's products, to even Elon Musk's X, that these systems are "woke", and they've been wanting to implement policies at the state level that would implement certain conservative values into the AI systems. Over half the states in the country, I should note, have had some form of legislation introduced on AI. Many of them, like California and New York, have seen progress on, whether it's an AI Bill of Rights about how people's data can be used and what the data can be used for and if the data can be used to manipulate people or if it's a more conservative approach, like we've seen in states like Texas and Utah that want to say, protect children or protect speech.

Those have been the debates that Sam Altman just really does not want to get into, and he's been running to Washington and saying, "Come up with one blanket system and make sure that it is not going to impede my ability to build and advance this industry that I'm promising is going to fundamentally change human society."

Brian Lehrer: It's interesting that some of the criticism of how AI systems are being developed is coming from the right, from conservatives who think that it will have woke assumptions built into it. I also hear criticisms from the left and from people representing racial minorities, for example, and other minorities that AI systems, as they're being programmed, will have majoritarian biases into it. Biases having to do with white people or straight people, other majorities. AI will wind up discriminatory in that direction. That could be another source of strange bedfellows, opposition to not wanting to be able to look at AI in detail, right?

Matt Brown: Oh, absolutely. I think that the questions of these algorithms being complete black boxes is one of the biggest challenges that we've seen in regulating this space. AI equity advocates is- Sorry.

Brian Lehrer: No, go ahead. Finish that answer, and then we're out of time, actually. Go ahead.

Matt Brown: AI equity advocates have made clear that this is something that is not going to go away as this technology changes, and that policymakers need to be nimble on it. We're going to be seeing whether Congress can actually decide to do this, because lawmakers have told me that they want to do something in Congress on artificial intelligence regulation, but the system is so gridlocked and sclerotic that they just haven't been able to get their act together. That will be seen.

Brian Lehrer: Matt Brown, national politics reporter for the Associated Press, Ursula Perano, Senate reporter, at the news site NOTUS. Thank you both so much.

 

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