MIL USHOR-2b Engine

Source: United States House of Representatives – Representative Don Beyer (D-VA)

U.S. Representatives Don Beyer (D-VA), Doris Matsui (D-CA), Ted Lieu (D-CA), Sara Jacobs (D-CA), and April McClain Delaney (D-MD), today introduced the Guaranteeing and Upholding Americans’ Right to Decide Responsible AI Laws and Standards (GUARDRAILS) Act to repeal President Donald Trump’s executive order entitled “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence,” which is designed to establish a moratorium on state-level artificial intelligence policies. This legislation would prohibit the executive order from taking effect to ensure states can enact commonsense safeguards to protect the American public in the face of rapidly evolving AI technologies. Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) is introducing companion legislation in the Senate.

President Trump’s executive order would kill responsible safety reforms without providing any federal protections or AI governance requirements to replace the state laws it seeks to preempt. This executive order was followed by the White House’s National AI Policy Framework, which reinforces the administration’s commitment to preempting state-level AI laws without the establishment of clear, enforceable guardrails to address the urgent risks posed by AI systems – in addition to attempting to limit Congressional regulatory action.

“In today’s lawless, Wild West artificial intelligence environment, states have been leading the charge to implement safeguards addressing serious risks ranging from algorithmic bias to data privacy and consumer protection. But the Trump White House aims to kill state AI laws without setting even minimally acceptable federal guardrails, exposing the American public to the growing risks accompanying completely unchecked artificial intelligence,” said Rep. Don Beyer. “Until federal action ensures safe and responsible AI development, deployment, and use, states must retain the ability to implement policies to protect the American public.”

“Embracing the amazing possibilities of AI can’t come at the cost of leaving Americans vulnerable to its profound risks, which is exactly what President Trump and Republicans are trying to do,” said Sen. Brian Schatz. “Preventing states from enacting common-sense regulation that protects people from the very real harms of AI is dangerous. Congress has a responsibility to get this technology right, but states must be allowed to act in the public interest in the meantime.”

“Republicans keep trying to strip states of the ability to enact commonsense AI safeguards—at a time when there are no meaningful federal protections in place,” said Rep. Doris Matsui.  “President Trump’s executive order is illegal coercion: it threatens states with costly lawsuits and tries to hold hostage the BEAD dollars Congress provided to connect every American to affordable broadband. As Ranking Member of the Communications and Technology Subcommittee, I won’t let the Administration weaponize broadband funding to bully states out of enforcing their AI laws. That’s why my colleagues and I are introducing this bill to repeal the order, and I will keep using every tool Congress has to stop this overreach and protect the public.”

“Congress has the responsibility to establish a national framework for AI and any attempt by Donald Trump to create laws through executive order is a sham. It is Congress’ responsibility to check this overreach of the presidency,” said Rep. Ted Lieu. “Pleased to work with my friend, Congressman Beyer, to make clear that Congress has the responsibility to create AI policy at the national level. Americans deserve a set of AI guardrails that promote responsible innovation, and doing that through Congress ensures the true interests of the American people are honored. I welcome any effort by the Administration to work with, and not around, Congress to establish a federal AI framework.”

“President Trump’s laissez-faire approach to AI regulation and trampling on states’ AI rights is incredibly dangerous for Americans’ rights and safety,” said Rep. Sara Jacobs. “Congress should be proactively creating the rules of the road to protect people while encouraging innovation – instead of taking the back seat to President Trump and his Big Tech donors. But in the meantime, we can’t wait, so I’m proud to co-lead the GUARDRAILS Act to repeal Donald Trump’s AI moratorium. We can’t let Donald Trump’s corruption stand in the way of protecting Americans and people around the world, spurring innovation, and fostering public trust.”

“I’ve built my career advocating for digital protections for our most vulnerable Americans, including children and seniors, from cyber threats like fraud, data breaches, deepfakes, and more. Businesses do better—and strive to do better—when commonsense laws are in place to guide their decisions,” said Rep. April McClain Delaney. “Trump’s Executive Order fails to recognize the important role states play in shaping the policies that drive U.S. competitiveness and innovation. It could not be more clear: the Administration is actively seeking ways to make the internet a more dangerous place.”

The legislation is cosponsored in the House by Representatives Jake Auchincloss (D-MA), Becca Balint (D-VT), Nanette Barragán (D-CA), Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR), Sean Casten (D-IL), Judy Chu (D-CA), Gil Cisneros (D-CA), Angie Craig (D-MN), Maxine Dexter (D-OR), Lizzie Fletcher (D-TX), Bill Foster (D-IL), Valerie Foushee (D-NC), Laura Friedman (D-CA), Ro Khanna (D-CA), John Larson (D-CT), Sarah McBride (D-DE), Betty McCollum (D-MN), Morgan McGarvey (D-KY), Jim McGovern (D-MA), Rob Menendez (D-NJ), Kelly Morrison (D-MN), Mike Quigley (D-IL), Luz Rivas (D-CA), Hillary Scholten (D-MI), Mark Takano (D-CA), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Paul Tonko (D-NY), Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ), and Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC).

Text of the Guaranteeing and Upholding Americans’ Right to Decide Responsible AI Laws and Standards (GUARDRAILS) Act is available here. 

Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) serves as co-Chair of the Congressional Artificial Intelligence Caucus. He was one of a handful of members selected to serve on the bipartisan Task Force On Artificial Intelligence, convened by House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Speaker Mike Johnson. He is the author of the AI Foundation Model Transparency Act and a lead cosponsor of the CREATE AI Act, the Federal Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Act, and the Artificial Intelligence Environmental Impacts Act.

Beyer previously served for eight years on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and is currently attending George Mason University as a part time student pursuing a master’s degree in machine learning, in part to help inform his work on AI in Congress.

Source: United States House of Representatives – Congressman John Garamendi – Representing California’s 3rd Congressional District

Source: United States House of Representatives – Congressman Steve Scalise (1st District of Louisiana)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), and Science, Space, and Technology Committee Chairman Brian Babin (R-Texas) released the following statement committing to act on the artificial intelligence (AI) framework released today by the Trump Administration:“AI has begun to demonstrate its potential to improve Americans’ lives. To ensure we continue to harness its potential and beat China in the global AI race, Congress must take action. Today, the Trump Administration took a critical step in releasing a framework that gives Congress a roadmap to pursue legislation that provides innovators with much-needed certainty, while protecting consumers and prioritizing kids’ online safety. House Republicans look forward to working across the aisle to enact a national framework that unleashes the full potential of AI, cements the U.S. as the global leader, and provides important protections for American families.” 

Source: United States House of Representatives – Representative Mike Johnson (LA-04)

Johnson, Scalise, Guthrie, Jordan, Babin: House Will Work to Implement National AI Framework

Source: United States House of Representatives – Congressman Steve Cohen (TN-09)

Expresses doubt the President will address city’s poverty, affordability, housing or workforce issues

Source: United States House of Representatives – Congresswoman Carol Miller (R-WV)

Washington, D.C. – This week, Reps. Miller (R-WV) and Sánchez (D-CA) introduced the Child Care Supply Tax Credit Act. This bipartisan legislation establishes a tax credit to help child care providers hire and retain highly qualified staff, addressing the nationwide child care shortage that continues to impact families across the country.

“Parents across the country continue to struggle with the rising costs of child care due to the industry’s workforce shortage. Attractive wages attract employees, and a large part of the cost of retaining the staff needed to adequately and safely care for the children is often passed on from the provider to the parents. Building on the increased Child Tax Credit and expansion of the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit that were secured by the passage of the Working Families Tax Cuts last summer, I am happy to join my colleagues Rep. Sánchez and Senators Justice and Warner in introducing the Child Care Supply Tax Credit Act to go one step further in addressing rising childcare costs. By providing a tax credit to assist our providers in paying their staff, we can limit the costs being passed on to parents,” said Congresswoman Miller.

“It’s ridiculous that it can be cheaper to send a child to college than to preschool. If we’re serious about supporting working families, we need to make child care more affordable and accessible. Our bill will help providers hire and retain qualified staff, so parents have reliable options for their young children without paying higher prices,” said Congresswoman Sánchez.

 

Senators Jim Justice (R-WV) and Mark R. Warner (D-VA)  introduced companion legislation in the Senate last year.

 

“Childcare providers simply can’t afford to pay their workers enough without passing those high costs on to parents. Families in West Virginia and across the country are spending thousands of dollars just to secure reliable childcare – it must be addressed. By creating a targeted tax credit tied directly to caregiver wages, we can pay the people who take care of our kids what they deserve while giving our hard-working families some breathing room,” said Senator Jim Justice.

“From health care premiums to groceries to utility bills, life is only getting more and more expensive for American families, and for many, the math simply doesn’t work without affordable child care. Child care is the foundation that allows parents to earn a living while providing kids with the head start they deserve. I’m proud to introduce this bipartisan legislation to address the workforce challenges contributing to our nation’s child care crisis,” said Senator Mark Warner.

A copy of the bill text can be found here.

Background:

• Child care providers across the nation are facing persistent resource constraints that have limited their ability to offer competitive wages.
• The recruitment and retention of qualified child care staff has become increasingly challenging, leading to workforce shortages that have, in some cases, caused facility closures.
• In West Virginia, families need an additional 20,000 childcare spots.

• The Child Care Supply Tax Credit Act creates a new tax credit for eligible childcare providers to help offset the cost of employee wages, allowing providers to increase worker wages, retain talent, and increase childcare supply.

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Source: United States House of Representatives – Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart (25th District of FLORIDA)

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Subcommittee on National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs, chaired by Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, will hold a field hearing on accountability and reform at the United Nations today Friday, March 20, at 10:00 a.m. ET.

The proceeding, which will include bipartisan appropriations participation and Representative of the United States of America to the United Nations Michael Waltz, will examine implementation of FY26 NSRP bill directives aimed at advancing lasting structural reforms and strengthening oversight and effectiveness of the UN system.

The full event will be available and livestreamed on the House Appropriations Committee’s YouTube channel.

ADDITIONAL DETAILS: 

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Source: United States House of Representatives – Congresswoman Doris Matsui (D-CA)

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Congresswoman Doris Matsui (CA-07), Ranking Member of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, released the following statement after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Media Bureau approved the merger between Nexstar Media Group and Tegna Inc. The move would allow a single media conglomerate to exceed the long-standing 39 percent national television ownership cap.

“Congress established the 39 percent national television ownership cap and only Congress has the authority to change it. Yet here we are watching an agency charged with enforcing the law tear it up on behalf of Donald Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr. This approval is an outrageous abuse of authority. It throws out limits designed to protect local journalism and viewpoint diversity. It hands Nexstar Media Group, a single conglomerate, unprecedented control over what millions of Americans see and hear.

“Let’s be clear about what this is and what it is not. This is not a serious effort to support local news or address the challenges posed by Big Tech. This is about handing power to a few massive corporations at the expense of local voices—the very voices that hold power accountable. We’ve already seen this administration intimidate broadcasters to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air. And now the same companies that folded under that pressure are being rewarded with a multi-billion-dollar merger. That’s not coincidence. That’s government pressure—and it’s unacceptable. If an agency can ignore clear statutory limits because it ‘wants to,’ then no law is safe.

“Local journalism cannot be strong when it is concentrated in fewer hands, and it cannot be free when it is vulnerable to political coercion. If the FCC insists on rubber-stamping this merger, then Congress must act immediately. That’s why I introduced the Broadcast Freedom and Independence Act—to stop political interference in our newsrooms and protect local broadcasters from retaliation. This is about whether we still believe in the promise of the First Amendment. And I will continue using every tool at my disposal to defend it.”

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Source: United States House of Representatives – Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (8th District of New York)

Today, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries appeared on MS NOW’s All In With Chris Hayes, where he emphasized that Democrats will continue to push back on Donald Trump’s reckless war of choice in the Middle East and the administration’s requests to continue spending taxpayer dollars in ways that do not make life better or more affordable for the American people.

CHRIS HAYES: Congressman Hakeem Jeffries of New York is the House Democratic Leader and he joins me now. Do you feel that you have a strong understanding of even what the U.S. objectives are? I mean, Tulsi Gabbard said today that the President has been clear about what the objectives are. They differ from what Israel’s are. And she sort of sputtered a little bit in trying to describe that tension. But are you even clear what our objectives are?

LEADER JEFFRIES: It’s a great question, Chris, and the administration has articulated shifting objectives. One day it’s regime change. The next day it’s about stopping Iran’s nuclear aspirations, even though the President claimed several months ago that Iran’s nuclear program had been completely and totally obliterated. Day after that, it was about stepping in to protect Iranian civilians, to try to push back against the Iranian regime. Then the day after that they’ll say it’s about intercontinental ballistic missiles, where there’s no evidence that Iran actually has missiles that could strike the United States. Then they have a broad claim saying that it was about an imminent threat to the United State of America, and their own former national security professionals acknowledge that there was no imminent threat to America. This is the reason why, Chris, amongst many others, that the war is so deeply unpopular because the American people understand there’s no justification for it. It’s a reckless war of choice. And billions of dollars are being spent to drop bombs in the Middle East while this administration can’t find a dime to actually make healthcare more affordable for the American people.

CHRIS HAYES: Speaking of those billion dollars. Today we got this headline. The Pentagon is going to try to get $200 billion dollars in a budget request for the Iran war. CNN reporting there’s some cracks emerging in the GOP over the Iran war cost. Some, a little bit of dissent from some Members in Congress about that price tag. I’m imagining you’re a no on this. But the question is, are you confident you can hold an entire Democratic Caucus together in the House and get full unanimity in a no for that $200 billion supplemental?

LEADER JEFFRIES: Yeah, we’ll have to have that conversation, but as your suspicions suggest, Chris, it would be my expectation that there is strong Democratic opposition against the notion of continuing to pour billions of dollars of additional money into a war with no justification, no plan, no strategy and no clear indication as to how to get out of it where there was no rationale to get into it in the first place. And, in fact, Donald Trump said as Candidate Trump that he was not going to get us into a reckless war of choice in the Middle East and then President Trump got us into a wreckless war of choice in the Middle East wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money. And the notion of them coming to Congress asking for $200 billion more is so beyond the pale that I’ve got to hope that these reports are inaccurate.

CHRIS HAYES: There was a War Powers vote, I think, a few weeks ago, in which Democrats, all but I think five, I want to say, on the Whip count, voted to force basically a restraint, a resolution, right? They would have forced a vote where Congress would have had to okay the action. My understanding of the reporting was that leadership whipped that vote. You whipped that vote, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, others, right. This was an important vote. Are you committed to whipping a vote on the supplemental if, in fact, they come to you for $200 billion, and really making this a priority for leadership?

LEADER JEFFRIES: Well, I don’t want to get out ahead of Whip Katherine Clark, because those are conversations that we have. But needless to say, clearly, there’s deep skepticism that I’ve publicly articulated, and other members of leadership have publicly articulated, including the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, Rosa DeLauro. But we’ll have that conversation when we need to have that conversation. What I can say is that it’s my expectation that we will have another War Powers Resolution vote sooner rather than later, potentially as early as next week, and we’re going to try to get to uniform Democratic support and get a handful of Republicans to join us so we can stop this reckless war of choice so that we don’t even have to deal with the possibility of considering some kind of request for $200 billion in additional taxpayer money who, as Bernie Sanders said, so much can be done with that to actually make life better for the American people in healthcare, in nutritional assistance, in housing and in other areas.

CHRIS HAYES: Well, I have to say, you know, everyone’s forgotten about the weird DOGE months in Washington when the President came in and Elon Musk set loose a bunch of twenty-somethings with AI to go fire a bunch of folks. But I, like, talked to, like, a park ranger that made $48,000 a year that lost their job. There are people that worked with veterans who lost their jobs. There are people that work in food safety that lost their job. We cut off emergency nutrition to some of the poorest, most starving people in the world. I mean, what does it say to you to say they’re going to spend $200 billion after going through all that?

LEADER JEFFRIES: I mean, it’s such an extraordinarily out-of-pocket request, out of bounds, out of control. I mean, the extremists just continue to show the American people who they are: the same group of people who enacted the largest cuts of Medicaid in American history, literally ripped healthcare away from 14 million Americans and, in that same One Big Ugly Bill, enacted the largest cut to nutritional assistance. They took $186 billion away from hungry children, veterans and seniors in America to give ICE a $75 billion slush fund to brutalize and kill American citizens, to give their billionaire donors a massive tax break and now they want to come back to the taxpayers for an additional $200 billion for a reckless war of choice. The whole thing is so extreme, so extraordinary in its request that you would think it was being written by a Hollywood screenwriter, this is not reality. But unfortunately, this is the national nightmare that we’re living through right now in Trump’s America, and we’re going to do everything we need to do to get through it, starting by winning the midterm elections in November.

Full interview can be watched here.

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Source: United States House of Representatives – Congresswoman Stacey E. Plaskett (USVI)