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Trump Gives Big Tech Friends an Early Christmas Gift With Order Against State AI Regulations
"This reward to Big Tech is a disgraceful invitation to reckless behavior by the world’s largest corporations," said one watchdog group.
Dec 12, 2025
US President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order aimed at preventing state-level regulation of the burgeoning artificial intelligence industry, a gift to tech corporations that bankrolled his inauguration and are currently funding his White House ballroom project.
Trump's order instructs the US Justice Department to establish an AI Litigation Task Force with a single mandate: sue states that enact AI laws that the administration deems "onerous and excessive." The order also threatens to withhold federal funding from states that implement AI regulations.
Public Citizen, a watchdog group that has tracked increasingly aggressive AI influence-peddling in Congress and the administration, said Trump's order "grants his greedy Big Tech buddies’ Christmas wish."
"This reward to Big Tech is a disgraceful invitation to reckless behavior by the world’s largest corporations and a complete override of the federalist principles that Trump and MAGA claim to venerate," said Robert Weissman, Public Citizen's co-president. "Everyone should understand why this is happening: During and since the last election cycle, Big Tech has spent at least $1.1 billion on campaign contributions and lobby expenditures. Big Tech corporations poured money into Trump’s inaugural committee and to pay for his garish White House ballroom. A major Big Tech and AI investor is serving as Trump’s 'AI czar' and driving administration policy."
"While Trump has ensured the federal government is doing almost nothing to address the harms that AI is already causing, states are moving forward with sensible AI regulation," Weissman added. "These include efforts to address political deepfakes, nonconsensual intimate deepfakes, algorithmic pricing manipulation, consumer protection measures, excessive data center electricity and water demand, and much more. Big Tech is whining about these modest measures, but there is zero evidence that these rules are impeding innovation; in fact, they are directing innovation in more positive directions."
Jenna Sherman, a campaign director focused on tech and gender at Ultraviolet Action, said Trump's order "only has one group of winners: his wealthy donors in the tech sector."
"Every other person loses from this wildly unpopular move. And not just in theory, as stripping away state AI regulations puts many—namely, women and children—at risk of real harm," said Sherman. "These harms of AI—which the Trump and the tech sector are clearly happy to ignore—are already here: non-consensual deepfake porn sexualizing women and girls, children being led to suicidal ideation by AI chatbots, and AI-powered scams and crimes targeting older Americans, especially women, to name but a few."
The US Chamber of Commerce and other corporate lobbying organizations representing tech giants such as Microsoft and Google celebrated the order, predictably characterizing it as a win for "small businesses."
The leaders of California and other states that have proposed and finalized AI regulations were defiant in the face of Trump's threats of legal action and funding cuts."
"President Trump and Davis Sacks aren’t making policy—they’re running a con," said California Gov. Gavin Newsom, referring to the scandal-plagued White House AI czar. "Every day, they push the limits to see how far they can take it. California is working on behalf of Americans by building the strongest innovation economy in the nation while implementing commonsense safeguards and leading the way forward."
Trump signed the order after the Republican-controlled Congress repeatedly rejected efforts to tuck a ban on state AI regulations into broader legislation.
"After months of failed lobbying and two defeats in Congress, Big Tech has finally received the return on its ample investment in Donald Trump," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said in a statement Thursday. "With this executive order, Trump is delivering exactly what his billionaire benefactors demanded—all at the expense of our kids, our communities, our workers, and our planet."
"A broad, bipartisan coalition in Congress has rejected the AI moratorium again and again," he added, "and I intend to keep that streak going. I will use every tool available to challenge this indefensible and irresponsible power grab. We will defeat it again."
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Following ‘Lobbying Blitz,’ Senators Sneak Provision Killing Food Safety Rules Into Shutdown Bill
“The next time you go to a restaurant and then uncontrollably vomit and diarrhea in your pants, you should send a note of thanks to the Republican and Democratic senators,” said David Sirota, founder of The Lever.
Nov 12, 2025
While the Republican and Democratic senators who passed this week’s emergency funding bill to reopen the government took heat for their failure to provide a solution to rising health insurance premiums, they also slipped other provisions under the radar that will likely harm Americans’ health.
As The Lever reported Tuesday, senators inserted language into the bill that would gut food safety regulations that prevent illness and death, as well as regulations on ultraprocessed foods.
The changes come “amid a lobbying blitz and a flood of campaign cash” from the food and restaurant industries which have spent more than $13 million lobbying the White House, Congress, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this year.
Amid a surge of product recalls for bacteria like Listeria, Salmonella, and E. coli, the number of dangerous cases of foodborne illness doubled last year, according to the Public Interest Network. These illnesses annually result in around 53,000 hospitalizations and 900 deaths, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.
Nevertheless, The Lever reports that the “new funding bill blocks federal rules designed to trace sources of outbreaks, and to prevent contamination of produce.” One provision bans the use of funds to administer or enforce the FDA’s "Requirements for Additional Traceability Records for Certain Foods," published in November 2022.
That traceability rule, The Lever notes, is “aimed to establish new record-keeping standards for companies to track their food products across the supply chain. Those records could help regulators identify the point of origin in the event of a major disease outbreak or food contamination event. The rule applied to produce, seafood, and certain dairy products, such as cheese, and exempted small businesses from the rule.”
The rule was initially proposed by the Trump administration during the Covid-19 pandemic, and enacted in 2023 by the Biden administration over aggressive opposition from industry groups. But after Trump’s return to office this year, they began a multimillion-dollar effort to lobby Congress to repeal the measure.
The National Restaurant Association spent nearly $2.5 million to lobby lawmakers to eliminate the rule, while the International Foodservice Distributors Association spent more than $600,000. In August, the Trump FDA proposed a rule to delay the traceability standards until 2028.
As The Lever explains: “The line inserted on page 154 of the new funding package contains identical language as the federal rule and would enshrine it into law.”
Two groups that have lobbied aggressively for deregulation of food tracking, the National Restaurant Association and the National Grocers Association, donated more than $750,000 to both parties’ congressional candidates and more than $145,000 to the two parties’ congressional election committees in the last election.
And they gave a combined $17,000 to three of the seven Democrats who joined Republicans in backing the bill—Sens. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).
“The next time you go to a restaurant and then uncontrollably vomit and diarrhea in your pants, you should send a note of thanks to the Republican and Democratic senators who helped their campaign donors slip this language into their legislation to reopen the government,” wrote The Lever’s founder, David Sirota, on social media.
The traceability rule is one of several regulations the bill, which is expected to come up for a vote in the House on Wednesday, would gut. It also requires that none of the bill’s funds go toward enforcing a 2015 FDA rule requiring stricter inspections of wine grapes, hops, almonds, and certain other crops.
It also axes funds for the FDA to establish new regulations to limit the public’s high intake of sodium, which is commonly found in highly processed foods. The effort to gut these regulations notably flies in the face of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s so-called “Make America Healthy” initiative.
Kennedy’s “MAHA” report, released in May, explicitly called for guidelines “that emphasize unprocessed foods while strictly limiting high-fat, high-sugar, and high-sodium processed items.”
“The most MAGA thing ever is embracing the so-called MAHA movement and then quietly gutting food safety regulations and research into ultra-processed foods,” said Neal Kwatra, the founder of the New York-based progressive group Metropolitan Public Strategies. “Just previously unseen levels of gaslighting on politics vs. actual policy.”
But Democrats allowed the measure to pass, too. For this, Melanie D’Arrigo, the executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, blamed the overwhelming power of corporate money.
“As long as corporations and billionaires are legally allowed to pay off politicians, we will never have a government that works for us,” she said.
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'Cartoon Villain' Ex-Senator Kyrsten Sinema Now Shilling for Big Tech's Power-Sucking AI Data Centers
"Being handmaiden to the AI tech lords in strong-arming local communities to accept AI data centers... is about as low as it goes," wrote one critic.
Oct 27, 2025
A former Democratic senator once known for a purported "independent streak" now says she is working "hand in glove" with the Trump administration to force communities to allow the construction of energy-devouring artificial intelligence data centers.
As reported by YourValley.Net, former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) recently attended a planning and zoning commission meeting in the city of Chandler, Arizona, in which she warned local officials that a massive data center would be built in their community whether they wanted it or not.
According to YourValley.Net, Sinema was at the meeting to advocate for plans created by New York-based developer Active Infrastructure to construct a massive 420,000-square foot data center in the city.
A video of the meeting posted on X by 12News reporter Brahm Resnik shows Sinema telling local officials that if they did not act to approve the data center, then the Trump administration would simply impose it on them without seeking their input.
"The AI action plan, set out by the Trump administration, says very clearly that we must continue to proliferate AI and AI data centers throughout the country," she said. "So federal preemption is coming. Chandler right now has the opportunity to determine how and when these new, innovative AI data centers will be built."
She then added that "when federal preemption comes, we'll no longer have that privilege, it will just occur, and it will occur in the manner in which they want it."
Former US Sen. Kyrsten Sinema lobbies for data center developer at Chandler AZ Plan Commission. Says she's working "hand in glove" w Trump Admin & warns city to embrace DCs or face federal intervention. City Council vote on Sinema's DC scheduled for Nov. 13. pic.twitter.com/KulHg594gj
— Brahm Resnik (@brahmresnik) October 24, 2025
The construction of AI data centers has provoked outrage throughout the US, as local residents have complained about the data centers consuming massive amounts of resources—increasing monthly electricity bills and, in some cases, disrupting local water supplies.
Mike Jacobs, a senior energy manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists, last month released an analysis estimating that data centers had added billions of dollars to Americans’ electric bills across seven different states in recent years. In Virginia alone, for instance, Jacobs found that household electric bills had subsidized data center transmission costs to the tune of $1.9 billion in 2024.
Some progressive critics were quick to denounce Sinema lobbying for AI data centers, as it confirmed the view they held during her Senate career that she shilled for corporate interests.
"[I] knew Sinema would show up in some super-scummy corporate role," remarked journalist Nathan Newman in a post on Bluesky. "But being handmaiden to the AI tech lords in strong-arming local communities to accept AI data centers—or face the wrath of the Trump administration—is about as low as it goes."
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) argued that Sinema's comments at the meeting show why "we need a lifetime ban on members of Congress lobbying."
Ian Carrillo, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma, expressed horror at the way major tech companies are deploying people such as Sinema to bully communities into accepting their plans.
"The AI bubble can't pop soon enough," he wrote. "These data centers are rolled out in the most anti-democratic ways, involving NDAs, shadow companies and, according to Sinema, federal preemption."
Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson condemned the former senator for "openly threatening localities."
Sinema's message to Chandler residents, said Robinson, was "Approve resource-sucking AI data centers in your communities, or I will work with the Trump administration to inflict data centers on you without consent, regardless of the harm that occursDrop Site News reporter Ryan Grim, meanwhile, simply labeled Sinema a "cartoon villain."
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