Lawmakers are under pressure to pass legislation to address the threats from advanced artificial intelligence, but many have serious doubts they have the capacity to regulate the technology’s explosive growth.
Few are expecting lawmakers themselves — some of whom still proudly use flip phones — to become AI experts overnight. But while even congressional Luddites acknowledge there is urgency for Capitol Hill to quickly expand its expertise in tech policy to help with legislating, regulating and conducting effective oversight, there’s no consensus yet on how to achieve it.
“We need to dramatically increase the base knowledge of Congress if we're going to legislate meaningfully,” Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-Calif.) said in a recent interview.
Congress already has a long track record of lagging behind as technological innovations transform the world beyond Washington: It has adopted a largely hands-off approach to regulating the Internet as it integrated into everyday life in the past 40 years, relying instead on existing laws that govern other industries and taking smaller piecemeal bites.
The challenging political environment won’t help speed things along now: Democrats are split over whether the answer is to put guardrails on the AI industry or ban “superintelligence” entirely, while many Republicans — including President Donald Trump — warn that any regulation would stifle innovation and cede ground to China.
Some members consider themselves fluent in AI policy, including several who have joined working groups on AI policy. Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and Don Beyer (D-Va.) have pursued masters degrees in AI and machine learning, in addition to many others who are self-taught.
The “overwhelming number” of lawmakers have some idea of what AI is and what it is capable of, Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-N.C.), co-chair of a House Democratic commission on AI policy, said in a recent interview. But, she added, “None of us can say that we understand where it's going.”
The larger concern is at the staff level — putting people with real expertise around the rank-and-file members who don’t have the bandwidth or interest in educating themselves on the frontier of the industry. Aides who do specialize in tech policy often get lured to the industry with huge salaries that can be hard to resist.
That’s where Travis Moore, a former congressional staffer, has spent more than a decade trying to help.
In 2015, Moore left his post as legislative director for Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and founded TechCongress, a nonprofit that places technology experts in member and committee offices. The hope is that those offices will be convinced to hire those fellows full-time — or at least recognize the need to secure in-house tech policy expertise.
“You should have a technologist at the table to at least mitigate the unknown unknowns,” Moore said, regardless of what members themselves know about technology.
As AI has boomed, so has demand for TechCongress’ fellows: In the last two years, Moore has fielded more than 1,200 applications for about 36 fellowship slots through the program, which does not accept funding from corporations or tech companies.
Of nearly 130 fellows selected through the program since its founding, Moore said 32 were later hired full-time. Two-thirds of all the fellows have pursued careers in public service, either on Capitol Hill or other government roles.
Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), one of the leaders on AI policy on Capitol Hill, is among the offices that currently employs a TechCongress fellow. The House Judiciary Committee, the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) also host fellows.
Moore says his initiative has shown there are plenty of people who want to work on Capitol Hill to help inform some of the most pressing issues of the moment — even when more lucrative salaries in the private sector beckon.
“The constraint is not talent supply,” Moore said in an interview. Rather, he said, it’s a matter of “Congress's will and capacity to absorb that talent.”
Some on Capitol Hill are advocating for an in-house hub — something like the long-defunct Office of Technology Assessment, which helped Congress understand emerging technology and its social and policy implications from 1972 until it was scrapped in 1995.
Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) has long championed efforts to revive the OTA for years and expects to reintroduce his legislation restoring the office in the coming weeks with bipartisan backing, spokesperson Austin Clark said.
Not everybody buys into the theory that staffing will solve the problem. Some conservatives, in particular, have seized on the lack of member expertise to argue for a hands-off approach to regulation.
“We don't understand it well enough,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), who has repeatedly brought in technology experts through the TechCongress fellowship, told reporters this month. “You can't address it based on what policymakers know about it on a one-size-fits-all universal basis. … We don't have the expertise to do it.”
“Do you really trust the members of Congress, who barely understand AI, to write the regulations around something?” added Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) in an interview last month.
Others don’t see a hopeless cause, but a convenient excuse.
“I understand it's hard, but lots of things we do here are hard,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said in an interview, noting that lawmakers have had to bone up quickly on everything from nuclear energy policy to complex weapons systems and advances in health care, like biologic drugs.
“I just think the industry wants us to believe that there's seven people who understand this, and that's just not true,” Murphy said, accusing some of his colleagues of “just throwing shit up against the wall to try to figure out how to justify doing nothing.”
A few members on both sides of the aisle have taken educating their colleagues into their own hands. Obernotle says he helped tutor more than two dozen House members through the bipartisan AI working group he chaired in the previous Congress.
Liccardo, who represents parts of Silicon Valley, recounted how he has brought in experts to brief lawmakers — including huge AI industry figures like Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Jensen Huang of Nvidia — only to struggle to convince members to attend.
“We have had challenges in the past trying to get folks' attention to the issues,” he said. “We have a lot of work to do, I'll just say, to get everybody up to speed.”
Riley Rogerson, Jordain Carney and Mia McCarthy contributed to this report.
