There was some inevitable blowback last week when U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said she would have voted against the Big Beautiful Bill if she’d known some of the things that are in it. For once, her critics need to cut her a little slack.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act — that’s the official name — is so long that on the congress.Gov website, it’s loaded in plain text format because it would take too long and possibly crash people’s computers to present it in the normal, nice-looking way. Greene can’t be the only House member who didn’t read all of it.
Even if you find it hard to believe that she or her staff didn’t know about the stuff that set her off after the vote, she has nevertheless done the public a favor by calling it out. Because it wasn’t some random morsel of pork that she was talking about, but the language that points directly toward the interests that are the real winners in this enormous legislation.
If you don’t want to read all of the bill, you can take an informative tour by starting at the top and doing a find on the word “intelligence” all the way to the bottom. Seldom is the word connected to human intelligence like that of all the experts who are no longer employed by our government. It’s all about refitting government operations for artificial intelligence and spending — well, hit the “find” button and watch the dollar signs.
There’s $250 million “for the advancement of the artificial intelligence ecosystem.” Another $450 million is allocated for the “application of autonomy and artificial intelligence to naval shipbuilding.” The Department of Defense will spend $200 million to “accelerate the audits of financial statements” using AI. And on and on.
What belatedly outraged Greene was a provision that says: “no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce, during the 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 decision systems entered into interstate commerce.”
When you think about all the data center fights going on across the nation and those recent predictions that AI could wipe out half the nation’s entry-level white-collar positions, the audacity of this language is truly stunning.
At the outset of a technological revolution, 10 years is pretty much the same thing as forever. To completely deny the states any jurisdiction over artificial intelligence during this period leaves them with no way to cope with the galvanic changes going on in their economies. The language is broad enough to leave the states with their hands tied, potentially in any area affected by AI, which over the next decade will be most of them.
We can be sure that very talented criminals are even now racing to figure out how to employ AI in the next generation of scams. As now written, the Big Beautiful Bill would complicate, if not render impossible, a state’s efforts to pass laws targeting these scams. That’s only one of the ways in which the bill would limit the rights of states navigating the future.
The federal government has lifted legal barriers and opened the door for promising new industries in the past. It has preempted the powers of the states in a number of areas, from prescription drugs to food labeling. It’s hard to think of examples where such sweeping protections have been granted to a broad conceptual category like AI. You can foresee the day when getting your operation defined as an AI “model” or “system” becomes a legal specialty.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was written to the satisfaction of interests that have made an enormous bet on AI, so big that they can’t be slowed by the normal legal restraints that apply to most businesses. A lot of interests are being served in the Big Beautiful Bill, actually, but this one is key to how the government and the economy will be run.
It’s hard to imagine how the provision Greene objected to could be good for the American people unless you think AI is such a sure bet that it’s worth ignoring states’ rights to speed it along.
It’s not.
