Concerns have emerged regarding overlooked language in President Donald Trump’s 'Big Beautiful Bill' regulating AI technology.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) -- Concerns have emerged regarding overlooked language in President Donald Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” that would prevent states and localities from regulating artificial intelligence (AI) technology for a full decade after enactment.
Passed last month by the U.S. House of Representatives and now before the Senate for consideration, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (BBB) aims to enact large portions of Trump’s legislative agenda through the budget reconciliation process, which requires only a simple majority vote in the Senate rather than the typical 60-vote threshold for standalone legislation.
It extends the 2017 Trump tax cuts, institutes various other tax changes proposed by Trump on the campaign trail, and includes several other conservative priorities, including funding for border security efforts, defunding Planned Parenthood, eliminating many “green” energy subsidies, and more.
However, it faces a vocal minority of conservative opposition over estimates that it will add a minimum of $2.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next decade; last week, the bill’s failure to include or be prefaced by codifying the spending cuts of the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project led to a dramatic falling out between Trump and former DOGE head Elon Musk. The administration and its defenders promise that separate legislation to codify DOGE cuts is still coming (starting with $9.4 billion from foreign aid and public broadcasting).
Recently, critics have also begun pointing to Section 43201, which says, "Except as provided in paragraph (2), 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 limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems."
Critics say this would infringe on the rights of state and local government to set their own policies relating to AI, and prevent it from being used in ways that infringe on Americans’ privacy, particularly in light of a recent report alleging the Trump administration is working with analytics company Palantir (which was co-founded by pro-Trump tech mogul Peter Thiel) on technology to consolidate all the federal government’s information on American citizens into one database that would make it more easily accessible across all agencies and empower agencies to factor information they traditionally do not have access to (such as medical history or gun ownership) into decisions that affect Americans’ rights, services, and scrutiny. (Palantir denies several of the report’s key details).
“Full transparency, I did not know about this section on pages 278-279 of the OBBB that strips states of the right to make laws or regulate AI for 10 years,” said prominent Republican MAGA Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who previously condemned Republican “no” votes as opposing Trump’s agenda. “I am adamantly OPPOSED to this and it is a violation of state rights and I would have voted NO if I had known this was in there.”
Libertarian Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, one of the only House Republicans to vote against the BBB, accused Speaker of the House Mike Johnson of circumventing House rules that are meant to give lawmakers adequate time to review the final text of legislation before holding votes on passage, meaning the “final language of the bill was released only a few minutes before debate began. The vote on the rule change and the vote on the bill followed within a couple of hours.”
On June 9, House conservatives circulated a memo urging the Senate to make further changes to the BBB before passing it, including deeper spending cuts, closing loopholes in the abortion and green defunding, and eliminating Section 43201.
“The federal government should not prevent states from being able to regulate artificial intelligence for the next 10 years, something Congress is still actively investigating and does not fully understand the implications,” it says.
