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The Supreme Court's Birthday Gift to the US? Killing Off Independent Agencies
Monday’s ruling overturns the basic idea—part of the fabric of our government for well over a century—that Congress has the power to create independent regulatory bodies.
Jun 30, 2026
First of all, you should know that I spent five years of my life advising the commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission how they could best protect Americans from monopolies and deceptive corporate practices.
I’m proud of the work the FTC did then, and proud of much of what it’s accomplished since then. When I served there, the chair of the FTC was Michael Pertschuk, an energetic and charismatic trust-buster and consumer advocate. More recently, the FTC has been chaired by Lina Khan, who courageously stood up to some of the biggest and most politically powerful corporations in America.
Part of the reason the FTC has been so effective is that it is—or was—independent, and therefore immune to the political moves of powerful corporations seeking to stop it from acting for the common good.
The FTC was established in 1914 as part of what’s known as the “progressive era” when the government first sought to rescue the nation from the grip of the robber barons who then ran the railroads, oil, shipping, and much of the rest of the economy—and corrupted the nation’s politics—during the First Gilded Age.
These independent agencies, staffed with experts, have become a major countervailing power to the political clout of large corporations. But as of Monday, they’re no longer independent and no longer have any countervailing power.
Reformers of that era created an income tax to try to limit the Robber Barons’ incomes, caps on corporate campaign expenditures to limit their political reach, and independent regulatory agencies such as the FTC to limit their power.
That progressive era was followed by the New Deal, when Congress and FDR established other independent regulatory agencies, modeled in part on the FTC, to use their expertise for the benefit of the American people—and not just the wealthiest an most powerful citizens whose unbridled greed had led the nation into the Great Depression.
We’re now in America’s Second Gilded Age, when a new set of robber barons (think Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry and David Ellison) are running much of the economy and corrupting our politics.
Unfortunately, we now have a president and a Supreme Court, three of whose members he appointed, who are in their pockets.
Hence, Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that a president can utterly disregard the will of Congress and install his own hacks in all independent regulatory agencies (with the odd exception of the Federal Reserve Board).
The ruling is in direct conflict with a 1935 case in which the court ruled that FDR could not replace an FTC commissioner because Congress had explicitly given FTC commissioners protection against such firing, in a case known as Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. Monday marked the culmination of a years-long weakening of that New Deal-era precedent.
Humphrey’s Executor v. United States concerned a federal law that protected commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission, saying they could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office”—the same language that Congress has since used to protect most other independent commissioners and board members throughout government.
Franklin D. Roosevelt nonetheless fired commissioner William Humphrey, arguing only that Humphrey’s actions were not aligned with the administration’s policy goals. The Supreme Court held that the firing was unlawful and the law establishing the independence of the Federal Trade Commission was constitutional.
But the Roberts Supreme Court doesn’t like independent regulatory agencies. Most of the current justices subscribe to what’s called the “unitary executive” theory, a bonkers notion that the framers intended for a president to have total control over every aspect of the executive branch.
It’s a bonkers theory because the framers didn’t say anything like this. In fact, their biggest fear was that the executive branch would become too powerful.
In 2020, the Roberts Supreme Court laid the groundwork for reversing Humphrey’s Executor in a case involving the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The law that created the bureau—again, using language identical to that at issue in Humphrey’s Executor—said the president could remove its director only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
In a 5-4 decision, the Roberts Supreme Court struck down that provision, ruling that it violated the separation of powers and that the president could remove the bureau’s director for any reason.
Roberts, writing for the majority, said the presidency requires an “energetic executive.” He continued, “In our constitutional system, the executive power belongs to the president, and that power generally includes the ability to supervise and remove the agents who wield executive power in his stead.”
Two justices—Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch—would have pulled the plug on independent agencies then and there. Thomas wrote: “The decision in Humphrey’s Executor poses a direct threat to our constitutional structure and, as a result, the liberty of the American people. With today’s decision, the court has repudiated almost every aspect of Humphrey’s Executor. In a future case, I would repudiate what is left of this erroneous precedent.”
Justice Elena Kagan, writing for what were then the court’s four liberals, dissented, saying the Constitution did not address the scope of the president’s power to fire subordinates. Congress should therefore be free, she said, to grant agencies “a measure of independence from political pressure.”
That 2020 decision by the majority of the Supreme Court anticipated the Supreme Court’s decision in July of 2024 that granted Trump, then a private citizen, immunity from prosecution for any “official” conduct during his first term.
Of all the things the framers of the Constitution worried about, their biggest worry was that a president would become as powerful as a king. Which is why they created Congress and the judiciary—to check and constrain him.
Congress has by now established 19 independent regulatory agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Office of Special Counsel.
These independent agencies, staffed with experts, have become a major countervailing power to the political clout of large corporations.
But as of Monday, they’re no longer independent and no longer have any countervailing power.
Monday’s ruling overturns the basic idea—part of the fabric of our government for well over a century—that Congress has the power to create independent agencies.
As the nation prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of our independence from a king, the Supreme Court and our current president are doing everything possible to resurrect a king in America.
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The Dangers of Big Business AI Pornography
Given the speed of AI’s development and its ubiquity, relying on companies to self-regulate is like closing the computer laptop after the deepfakes have been posted.
Mar 28, 2026
The explosion of AI into the marketplace has led to fears that workers, including white collar workers, will soon become obsolete; that Big Tech firms will control more and more property including intellectual property; that AI data centers will require so much energy as to overwhelm small communities, raise electricity prices, and accelerate global warming; and that the ongoing gathering of money, power,and software in the hands of tech billionaires will enable them to control political discourse and surveil the masses. Critics rightfully worry about AI upsetting social conventions, invading personal privacy, destroying jobs by making workers redundant, and challenging social mores.
When considered soberly, the risks of AI are the risks that accompany any new technology: reinforced racial bias and discrimination, economic inequality, deskilling of workers, and misinformation and manipulation that reflect existing power structures. Already pervasive society-wide gender and racial biases are reinforced in AI. The demographic of those programming AI systems are overwhelmingly white men, leading to biases in the development of AI tools, cybersecurity systems, policing software, and cameras.
AI Threatens Children
AI has become a powerful force even in the area of pornography, where the dangers that accompany its spread illuminate the risks of the diffusion of AI generally. The shocking impacts include deepfakes (the artificial use of images to embarrass or hurt others) and child abuse. Elon Musk’s “Grok” app is allowing users to undress anyone including minors, while “X” refuses to take action. The American Federation of Teachers left “X” because of its dissemination of “sickening” images of children in various states of nudity.
These worries are playing out against the backdrop of the Epstein sexual predator scandal that also involves modern technology, wealth, and privileged men. It is reflected in the unfettered development of pornographic applications, too many of which thrive on sexual exploitation of women and children. In the US the determination of President Donald Trump to avoid regulations of AI at the urgings of industry thus becomes a greater danger. The spread of risky AI pornography results not from the unfettered prurient interests of purveyors and users, nor from a lack of moral safeguards, but from a failure of governance and unwillingness to stifle profit in the name of free speech.
The exploitation of women’s sexual images without consent, coupled with the lack of robust oversight or age verification for mainstream platforms, perpetuates a cycle of harm.
In order to exert proper controls on the dark, abusive side of AI porn—and AI generally—we must understand what it is, how it developed, and how it might be controlled. Pornographic content has had a major presence in erotic and bawdy books and magazines over the centuries. You might say it became mainstream with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (late 14th century), although the modern notion of pornography arose in the mid-19th century. The internet enabled a pornography boom by bringing it to any computer and eventually to any cell phone. If porn was expensive to produce, it generated high income. This stimulated further development of internet platforms where it is both pervasive and free. Rather than selling copies of videos, industry cleverly embraced online platforms to create multiple income streams through blind links, pop-up windows, pay-per-click ads, and by sharing of traffic with other sites.
A Big Dangerous Business
AI and such associated technologies as handheld electronic cameras and web pages have transformed the porn industry from being large and studio centered to being a cottage industry for virtually any tube site, small warehouse, or apartment. But Big Tech dominates. Of over 1 billion websites, of which less than 200 million are active, at least 4% are porn related, and perhaps as many as 12%. By usage, even more of the net is related to pornography, perhaps 30% of the internet’s data usage, with raw bandwidth usage six times larger than for Hulu or Youtube. MindGeek, the owner of several of the most visited sites including Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn, is a dominant force. Between 2013 and 2019, the number of visits registered in Pornhub grew threefold from 14.7 to 42 billion, and it is increasingly originating from mobile devices; in January 2024 alone there were 11.4 billion mobile visits worldwide.
The majority of users are male.
All of these visits to porn sites generate huge profits, well over $100 billion worldwide annually. For perspective: these profits are greater than those for Apple, GM, and other major corporations. By the 2020s the top porn producing countries were: the United States, at 24.5%; the United Kingdom, 5.5%; and Germany, Brazil, France, and Russia at between 4% and 5%. The vibrant OnlyFans site, in which performers own their own content, reported $7.22 billion in gross revenue in 2024. During the Covid-19 pandemic, as isolated individuals turned to the web for sexual comfort, OnlyFans gross revenue rose 118%, followed by annual increases of 16% and 19% in 2022 and 2023, respectively.
Technologies of AI Porn
The development of AI-generated pornography moved hand in hand with the rise of generative artificial intelligence. Much of the material is artificial, or at the very least enhanced. Many publicly accessible AI models generate text, audio, and images across the entire human spectrum of activities. They include ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek DALL-E, and Midjourney which have content moderation systems to prevent the creation of sexually explicit material. But a large volume of the output is deepfakes and child pornography, both of which have generated outrage and calls for its control, if not outright illegalization, and its rapid removal from the worldwide web. And moderation works only so far.
As quickly as new AI programs are developed, work-arounds to the restrictions are found. A separate market for so-called unmoderated or uncensored generative AI tools has also emerged which enables production of sexually explicit content through web and app interfaces. As examples: Dreampress.ai and MySpicyVanilla.com prompt erotic stories, while PornPen.ai, Pornderful.ai, Unstability.ai, and other apps enable pornographic images or videos. The exploitation of women’s sexual images without consent, coupled with the lack of robust oversight or age verification for mainstream platforms, perpetuates a cycle of harm.
Deepfakes and Child Abuse
By now websites dedicated to AI-generated adult content have spread into the mainstream where they may promote predation. They are first of all businesses dedicated to generating market interest and making profit, not in self-regulation. Drawing on huge libraries and data sets, they enable users to customize their preferences for body type; facial features; such enhancements as implants, tattoos, and piercings; kinds of encounters and positions; and fetishes. From the privacy of one’s domain, a user can thereby have sexual encounters, thinking he may do so without endangering others or himself.
Ultimately, however, AI pornography distorts human sexuality, because everything is on demand and seemingly risk free. It trains desire without reciprocity. It erodes the human capacity for negotiation, refusal, and mutual recognition. What looks like personalization of preference is actually the substitution of a screen for a living, feeling autonomous partner. Thus, AI porn is less about sex than about power: It teaches users to expect intimacy without vulnerability and especially without responsibility, and it facilitates abuse of women and girls.
Because of the ease of production, the amorality of website owners, and the lack of regulation, there has been limited progress in fighting deepfakes.
This terrible reality plays out with respect to deepfakes. Deepfakes make it possible for people to create naked photos or videos of someone, then to use the artificial pornography to embarrass, blackmail, or otherwise hurt her (him). “Nudify” sites have proliferated rapidly, allowing millions of people to create nonconsensual images. Apps like DeepSwap and Face Swapping, which enable users to swap out faces in a video with a different face obtained elsewhere, have proliferated since the emergence of generative AI three years ago. Digitally edited pornographic videos featuring the faces of hundreds of non-consenting women get tens of millions of visitors on websites.
Deepfakes are a “new method to deploy gender-based violence and erode women’s autonomy in their on-and-offline world.” In fact, in 2023, 98% of 95,820 deepfakes online were pornographic and 99% of those videos targeted women. To facilitate targeting, AI entrepreneurs created a website, MrDeepFakes, to which altered images have been uploaded for viewing and purchase. Deepfakes may be used as “revenge porn” when a jilted suitor determines to abuse an acquaintance by posting nonconsensual intimate AI images. As Paris Hilton recently testified on Capitol Hill about her experience with a private video gone public: “People called it a scandal. It wasn’t. It was abuse.”
As a result, there has been a sharp increase in crimes targeting children on the internet (online enticement, AI abuse, and trafficking). Reports of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) related to child sexual exploitation have skyrocketed from 6,835 reports to 440,419 in the last year alone. In the past few years in the US, 93.5% of individuals sentenced for sexual abuse were men, 67% of the cases involving child pornography were white men, and 95% were US citizens. In February 2025 Europol busted a criminal gang that was distributing AI-generated images of child sexual abuse online. Abusive behavior extends to secondary schools where students produce deepfake nude photos of their classmates with the help of AI. Boys are much more likely to generate a deep nude photo than girls. But because of the ease of production, the amorality of website owners, and the lack of regulation, there has been limited progress in fighting deepfakes.
Voluntary Regulation Doesn’t Work; It Enables Musk
In response to public outcry over perceived dangers of recombinant DNA research in the 1970s, the Cambridge, Massachusetts City Council voted to restrict work at MIT and Harvard laboratories. The vote, and concerns of molecular biologists themselves, led the burgeoning rDNA industry to adopt safety regulations on its own. In AI, too, the industry is by and large self-regulated to guard against misuse, disarm public interference, and ensure booming business opportunities. However, given the speed of AI’s development and its ubiquity, such a decision to self-regulate is like closing the computer laptop after the deepfakes have been posted.
A number of social media platforms and AI companies voluntarily introduced regulations and standards to limit hate speech, and combat incitement to violence against specific groups, genders, and orientations. More recently, many of these safeguards have been removed in the name of free speech and the right of the public to information. This has resulted in an explosion in hate speech, racism, and deepfakes. For example, after its acquisition by Elon Musk, Twitter took longer to review hateful content and remove it, an unsurprising result given that Musk fired thousands of employees who were responsible for moderation. He also has a misogynist view of women (whom he called “womb-creatures”), and he publicly saluted the Nazis who, he believes, merit a platform. Homophobic, transphobic, and racist hate speech on Twitter increased 50% under his ownership.
Similarly, in keeping with his quasi-libertarian views of free speech, Musk has refused to reign in Grok, his AI tool. Grok has a “Spicy” option that is being used to produce disgusting photographs of women and children in sexually compromising, explicit, and abusive situations. X officially allows pornographic content on its platform, too, but says it will block adult and violent posts from being seen by users who are under 18 or who do not opt in to see it. Shockingly, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth plans to integrate Grok into Pentagon networks, including classified systems, as part of a broader initiative to incorporate AI technology across the military. Does Hegseth have in mind the production of military deepfakes?
Self-Regulation Fails the Vulnerable
Having captured Trump’s fumbling mind, the massive AI industry has convinced the president to oppose meaningful local, state, and national laws to avoid “onerous” interference with commerce that may slow innovation. This lack of regulation has spilled over into AI and pornography. The technological billionaires who promote and sell AI applications in pornography may not understand or care about the abuse and suffering of women and children that has resulted from their apps. After all, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Howard Lutnik, Sergey Brin, Reid Hoffman, and many more techno billionaires in government and industry have been linked directly to the Epstein scandal. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing in the heavily redacted files released by the US Department of Justice that these men committed sex crimes. But what do these contacts say about their attitudes toward women and children and what has been the result?
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has found thousands of AI-generated pictures online involving the sexual abuse of children. Such groups as the Sexual Violence Prevention Association have demanded stricter controls on AI image tools, swift takedown mechanisms, and legal action against those generating and circulating abusive content. But the number of realistic images, nearly all of which involve girls, skyrockets annually. Perpetrators easily download open-source AI models to their computers and quickly evade safeguards.
Confronting the purveyors of abusive AI and fighting immoral profit works.
Deepfakes might be addressed through such regulatory initiatives as the California AI Transparency Act, the Take It Down Act, the EU AI Act, and the UK Online Safety Act 2023. In 2024 the Czech Justice Ministry acted to amend a law that would make deepfake porn a criminal offense and make it easier for victims to defend themselves. The European Union has taken steps to address cyberstalking, online harassment, and incitement to hatred and violence. Unfortunately, enforcement remains inconsistent. For example, Scotland’s 2021 hate speech law criminalizes incitement to prejudice hatred, but excludes misogynistic hate.
Confronting the purveyors of abusive AI and fighting immoral profit works. Age and prior consent verification and other checks are always technically feasible to prevent abusive AI porn. Listening to pressure from anti-porn advocacy groups, Visa and Mastercard finally refused to accept payments from Pornhub, the world’s leading porn site, after a New York Times report that documented abuse and rape. This did more to slow Pornhub’s damaging practices than did years of content moderation. Ultimately, however, platforms face little accountability for hosting harmful content or for profiting from it.
Generating Safe AI Smut
CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, believes in treating “adult users like adults” with some age-gating, but little control. Many apps and sites hire armies of content moderators to catch illegal and offensive content. But we have seen how Musk’s decision to fire moderators led to an increase in violent hate speech. OpenAI thus is actively recruiting a “head of preparedness”—a well-paid human—to address the “real challenges” of AI models. He had in mind the “potential impact of models on mental health” and other models that can find “critical vulnerabilities” that attackers intend to use for harm. Altman’s announcement followed growing concern over the impact of AI chatbots on mental health, with lawsuits alleging that OpenAI’s ChatGPT “reinforced users’ delusions, increased their social isolation, and led some individuals to suicide.”
Like any other technological advance whose promoters have promised revolutionary changes in society and whose detractors have worried about the potential for moral, cultural, and social collapse, AI, in all of its applications, is a human technology, one that will be embraced and applied in human ways. The internet gives an open microphone to voices of anger and reason, to racism and equality, to raw pornographic images and erotic art with few filters. The Luddites of the early 19th century, the factory workers of the mid-20th century, and the more modern critics of robotics have long worried about their inevitable replacement by machines. Now AI has replaced pornographic models. Surely, the next steps require human analysis and intervention that machines, AI, and its billionaire owners can never provide.
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Executive Order Attacking State AI Laws 'Looks a Lot Like' Industry Dictating Trump's Policies
"Big Tech companies have spent the past year cozying up to Trump," said one critic, "and this is their reward. It’s a fabulous return on a very modest investment—at the expense of all Americans.”
Nov 20, 2025
The White House is rapidly expanding on its efforts to stop state legislatures from protecting their constituents by passing regulations on artificial intelligence technology, with the Trump administration reportedly preparing a draft executive order that would direct the US Department of Justice to target state-level laws in what one consumer advocate called a "blatant and disgusting circumvention of our democracy"—one entirely meant to do the bidding of tech giants.
The executive order would direct Attorney General Pam Bondi to create an AI Litigation Task Force to target laws that have already been passed in both red and blue states and to stop state legislators from passing dozens of bills that have been introduced, including ones to protect people from companion chatbots, require studies on the impact of AI on employment, and bar landlords from using AI algorithms to set rent prices.
The draft order takes aim at California's new AI safety laws, calling them "complex and burdensome" and claiming they are based on "purely speculative suspicion" that AI could harm users.
“States like Alabama, California, New York and many more have passed laws to protect kids from harms of Big Tech AI like chatbots and AI generated [child sexual abuse material]. Trump’s proposal to strip away these critical protections, which have no federal equivalent, threatens to create a taxpayer-funded death panel that will determine whether kids live or die when they decide what state laws will actually apply. This level of moral bankruptcy proves that Trump is just taking orders from Big Tech CEOs,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project.
The task force would operate on the administration's argument that the federal government alone is authorized to regulate commerce between states.
Shakeel Hashim, editor of the newsletter Transformer, pointed out that that claim has been pushed aggressively in recent months by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
President Donald Trump "and his team seem to have taken that idea and run with it," said Hashim. "It looks a lot like the tech industry dictating government policy—ironic, given that Trump rails against 'regulatory capture' in the draft order."
The DOJ panel would consult with Trump and White House AI Special Adviser David Sacks—an investor and cofounder of an AI company—on which state laws should be challenged.
The executive order would also authorize Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to publish a review of "onerous" state AI laws and restrict federal broadband funds to states found to have laws the White House disagrees with. It would further direct the Federal Communications Commission to adopt a new federal AI law that would preempt state laws.
The draft executive order was reported days after Trump called on House Republicans to include a ban on state-level AI regulations in the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act, which House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) indicated the party would try to do.
The multipronged effort to stop states from regulating the technology, including AI chatbots that have already been linked to the suicides of children, comes months after an amendment to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was resoundingly rejected in the Senate, 99-1.
Travis Hall, director for state engagement at the Center for Democracy and Technology, suggested that legal challenges would be filed swiftly if Trump moves forward with the executive order.
"The president cannot preempt state laws through an executive order, full stop," Hall told NBC News. "Preemption is a question for Congress, which they have considered and rejected, and should continue to reject."
David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, said harm the draft order could pose becomes clear "once you ask one simple question: What is an AI law?"
The draft doesn't specify, but Dayen posited that a range of statutes could apply: "Is that just something that has to do with [large language models]? Is it anything involving a business that uses an algorithm? Machine learning?"
"You can bet that every company will try to get it to apply to their industry, and do whatever corrupt transactions with Trump to ensure it," he continued. "So this is a roadmap to preempt the vast majority of state laws on business and commerce more generally, everything from consumer protection to worker rights, in the name of preventing 'obstruction' of AI. This should be challenged immediately upon signing."
The draft order was reported amid speculation among tech industry analysts that the AI "bubble" is likely about to burst, with investors dumping their shares in AI chip manufacturer Nvidia and an MIT report finding that 95% of generative AI pilot programs are not presenting a return on investment for companies. Executives at tech giant OpenAI recently suggested the government should provide companies with a "guarantee" for developing AI infrastrusture—which was widely interpreted as a plea for a bailout.
At Public Citizen, copresident Robert Weissman took aim at the White House for its claim that AI does not pose risks to consumers, noting AI technologies are already "undermining the emotional well-being of young people and adults and, in some cases, contributing to suicide; exacerbating racial disparities at workplaces; wrongfully denying patients healthcare; driving up electric bills and increasing greenhouse gas emissions; displacing jobs; and undermining society’s basic concept of truth."
Furthermore, he said, the president's draft order proves that "for all his posturing against Big Tech, Donald Trump is nothing but the industry’s well-paid waterboy."
"Big Tech companies have spent the past year cozying up to Trump—doing everything from paying for his garish White House ballroom to adopting content moderation policies of his liking—and this is their reward," said Weissman. "It’s a fabulous return on a very modest investment—at the expense of all Americans.”
JB Branch, the group's Big Tech accountability advocate, added that instead of respecting the Senate's bipartisan rejection of the earlier attempt to stop states from regulating AI, "industry lobbyists are now running to the White House."
"AI scams are exploding, children have died by suicide linked to harmful online systems, and psychologists are warning about AI-induced breakdowns, but President Trump is choosing to protect his tech oligarch friends over the safety of middle-class Americans," said Branch. "The administration should stop trying to shield Silicon Valley from responsibility and start listening to the overwhelming bipartisan consensus that stronger, not weaker, safeguards are needed.”
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Warren, Jayapal Introduce Bill Aimed at Curbing Corporate Meddling in Regulations
“While Donald Trump keeps selling away influence over our government, we’re fighting to ensure the rules are being written to help working Americans, not corporate interests," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Nov 19, 2025
Two progressive Democrats are teaming up to push legislation to curb corporate America's capture of the federal government's regulatory process.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Wednesday announced a new bill called the Experts Protect Effective Rules, Transparency, and Stability (EXPERTS) Act that aims to restore the role of subject matter experts in federal rulemaking.
Specifically, the bill would codify the Chevron doctrine, a 40-year legal precedent overturned last year by the US Supreme Court, which held that courts should be broadly deferential to decisions made by independent regulatory agencies about interpretations of congressional statutes.
The legislation would also push for more transparency by requiring the disclosure of funding sources for all "scientific, economic, and technical studies" that are submitted to agencies to influence the rulemaking process.
Additionally, the bill proposes speeding up the regulatory process by both "excluding private parties from using the negotiated rulemaking process" and reinstating a six-year limit for outside parties to file legal challenges to agencies' decisions.
In touting the legislation, the Democrats pitched it as a necessary tool to rein in corporate power.
“Many Americans are taught in civics classes that Congress passes a law and that’s it, but the reality is that any major legislation enacted must also be implemented and enforced by the executive branch to become a reality,” said Jayapal. “We are seeing the Trump administration dismantle systems created to ensure that federal regulation prioritizes public safety. At a time when corporations and CEOs have outsized power, it is critical that we ensure that public interest is protected. This bill will level the playing field to ensure that laws passed actually work for the American people."
Warren, meanwhile, argued that "giant corporations and their armies of lobbyists shouldn’t get to manipulate how our laws are implemented," and said that "while Donald Trump keeps selling away influence over our government, we’re fighting to ensure the rules are being written to help working Americans, not corporate interests."
The proposal earned an enthusiastic endorsement from Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert, who described it as "the marquee legislation to improve our regulatory system."
"The bill aims directly at the corporate capture of our rulemaking process, brings transparency to the regulatory review process and imposes a $250,000 fine on corporations that submit false information, among other things," she said. "The bill is essential law for the future of our health, safety, environment, and workers. Public Citizen urges swift passage in both chambers."
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Trump Calls for GOP to Ram Through AI Regulation Ban in Must-Pass Military Spending Bill
"If lawmakers are serious about AI governance, they must create strong, enforceable national protections as a regulatory floor—not wipe out state laws so Big Tech can operate without consequence," said one consumer advocate.
Nov 19, 2025
A Republican push to stop state legislatures from regulating artificial intelligence, including chatbots that have been found to pose harm to children, resoundingly failed over the summer, with 99 out of 100 senators voting against the provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—but the previous rejection of the idea isn't stopping President Donald Trump and GOP lawmakers from trying again to impose a moratorium.
On Tuesday, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that House Republicans should take action against "overregulation by the States" in the AI field.
Claiming that "DEI ideology" in AI models in some states will "undermine this Major Growth 'Engine'" and that "Investment in AI is helping to make the U.S. Economy the 'HOTTEST' in the World"—despite tech industry leaders' warnings that the value of AI investments may have been wildly overestimated and the bubble may be on the cusp of bursting—Trump called on Republicans to include the state regulations ban in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), "or pass a separate Bill."
Also on Tuesday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) told Punchbowl News that the GOP is considering adding language to the NDAA that would effectively ban state AI regulations, which have been passed in both Democratic- and Republican-led states. Those laws would be nullified if Republicans follow through with the plan.
Since the annual defense spending bill is considered a must-pass package by many lawmakers, inserting amendments related to other legislative goals is a common strategy used in Congress.
Trump previously tried to circumvent Congress' rejection of the moratorium in July, when he announced his AI Action Plan.
Emphasizing that the anti-regulatory effort has been rejected by "an alliance of Democrats, Republicans, social conservatives, parents rights groups, medical professionals, and child online protection groups," the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen on Tuesday called Trump's renewal of the push "highly inappropriate" and said it "would risk stripping away vital civil rights, consumer protection, and safety authority from states without putting any federal guardrails in place."
JB Branch, Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen, said that "AI preemption strips away the safeguards states have enacted to address the very real harms of AI."
"Big Tech and its allies have spent months trying to ban states from protecting their own residents, all while refusing to support any meaningful federal AI safeguards," said Branch. "Congress should reject this maneuver outright. If lawmakers are serious about AI governance, they must create strong, enforceable national protections as a regulatory floor—not wipe out state laws so Big Tech can operate without consequence.”
On Tuesday, the Republican-controlled House Committee on Energy and Commerce held a hearing on "AI Chatbot Advantages and Disadvantages," where one witness, psychologist Marlynn Wei, warned that "AI chatbots endorse users 50% more than humans would on ill-advised behaviors."
In September, several grieving parents testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that their children had died by suicide after being encouraged to take their own lives by AI chatbots.
At Tuesday's hearing, Ranking Member Frank Pallone (D-NJ) said that "Congress must be sure to allow states to put in place safeguards that protect their residents."
"There is no reason for Congress to stop states from regulating the harms of AI when Congress has not yet passed a similar law," he said.
Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) also addressed the issue, suggesting it was surprising that the Republican members would bother holding a hearing on the harms of AI when they are planning to strip state lawmakers of their ability to protect their constituents from those harms.
"I'm having real difficulty in reconciling this hearing and all that we've heard about the risks of AI chatbots, especially to our children, with the attempt by the House Republican leadership to ban state-level AI regulations," said Trahan. "Republicans' push for this regressive, unconstitutional, and widely condemned AI policy is real and it's unrelenting."
👀MUST WATCH: @RepLoriTrahan takes down House GOP’s efforts to slip the disastrous AI preemption into the NDAA — wiping out state laws that protect kids, seniors, and veterans. It’s a big handout for Big Tech. pic.twitter.com/8NxdkcDgul
— The Tech Oversight Project (@Tech_Oversight) November 18, 2025
"Let's just say in public what you are pushing in private," she added. "Don't be holding these hearings about the risks of AI chatbots while behind closed doors you kneecap state legislatures from protecting their constituents. I mean, if the AI moratorium is the topic in the speaker's office let's make it so in this hearing room, because the American people deserve to know where you truly stand on AI regulation."
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Groups Warn Trump Executive Orders Would Spike Cancers Caused by Exposure to Nuclear Radiation
A letter implored the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to "stand up to the executive order’s marching orders to 'promote' nuclear power."
Nov 14, 2025
A series of nuclear power-related executive orders issued by President Donald Trump seek to legitimize people's "suffering as the price of nuclear expansion," said one expert at Beyond Nuclear on Friday, as the nongovernmental organization spearheaded a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and top Trump administration officials warning of the public health risks of the orders.
More than 40 civil society groups—including Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), Sierra Club, Nuclear Watch South, and the Appalachian Peace Education Center—signed the letter to the commission, calling on officials not to revise the NRC's Standards for Protection Against Radiation, as they were directed to earlier this year by Trump.
"NRC has not made a revision yet, and has been hearing that the Part 20 exposure (external only) should be taken from the existing 100 mr [milliroentgen] a year, per license, to 500 mr a year, and in view of some, even to 10 Rems [Roentgen Equivalent Man], which would be 100 times the current level," reads the letter.
In 2021, noted PSR, the NRC "roundly rejected" a petition "to raise allowable radiation exposures for all Americans, including children and pregnant women, to 10 Rems a year."
The revision to radiation limit standards would result in anywhere from 5-100 times less protection for Americans, said the groups, with 4 out of 5 adult males exposed over a 70-year lifetime developing cancer that they otherwise would not have.
"Radiation is dangerous for everyone,” said Amanda M. Nichols, lead author of the 2024 study Gender and Ionizing Radiation. “[Trump’s] executive order will allow the industry to relax the current standards for radiological protection, which are already far from adequate. This will have detrimental health consequences for humans and for our shared environments and puts us all at higher risk for negative health consequences. ”
The change in standards would be even more consequential for women, including pregnant women, and children—all of whom are disproportionately susceptible to health impacts of ionizing radiation, compared to adult males.
"Radiation causes infertility, loss of pregnancy, birth complications and defects, as well as solid tumor cancer, leukemia, non-cancer outcomes including cardiovascular disease, increased incidence of autoimmune disease, and ongoing new findings.”
In Gender and Ionizing Radiation, Nichols and biologist Mary Olson examined atomic bomb survivor data and found that young girls "face twice the risk as boys of the same age, and have four to five times the risk of developing cancer later in life than a woman exposed in adulthood."
Despite the risks to some of the country's most vulnerable people, Trump has also called for a revision of "the basis of the NRC regulation," reads Friday's letter: the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model, the principle that there is no safe level of radiation and that cancer risk to proportional to dose.
The LNT model is supported by decades of peer-reviewed research, the letter states, but one of Trump's executive orders calls for "an additional weakening of protection by setting a threshold, or level, below which radiation exposure would not 'count' or be considered as to have not occurred."
The Standards for Protection Against Radiation are "based on the well-documented findings that even exposures so small that they cannot be measured may, sometimes, result in fatal cancer," reads the letter. "The only way to reduce risk to zero requires zero radiation exposure."
Trump's orders "would undermine public trust by falsely claiming that the NRC’s radiation risk models lack scientific basis, despite decades of peer-reviewed evidence and international consensus supporting the LNT model," it adds.
The signatories noted that the US government could and should strengthen radiation regulations by ending its reliance on "Reference Man"—a model that the NRC uses to create its risk assessments, which is based on a young adult male and fails to reflect the greater impact on infants, young children, and women.
“Newer research has shown that external radiation harms children more than adults and female bodies more than male bodies," reads the letter. "Existing standards should therefore be strengthened to account for these life-stage and gender disparities… not weakened. Radiation causes infertility, loss of pregnancy, birth complications and defects, as well as solid tumor cancer, leukemia, non-cancer outcomes including cardiovascular disease, increased incidence of autoimmune disease, and ongoing new findings.”
Olson, who is the CEO of the Generational Radiation Impact Project, which also helped organize the letter, warned that "radiation causes cancer in women at twice the rate of adult men, while the same exposure in early childhood, will, across their lifetimes, produce seven times more cancer in young females, and four times more in young males.”
The groups emphasized that "executive orders do not have the power to require federal agencies to take actions that violate their governing statutes, nor to grant them powers and authorities that contradict those governing statutes. The NRC needs to stand up to the executive order’s marching orders to 'promote' nuclear power—a mission outside its legal regulatory mandate under the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 and the concurrent amendments to the Atomic Energy Act."
Federal agencies including the NRC, they added, "should not favor industry propaganda asserting that some radiation is safe over science-based protection of the public. This is a deliberate subversion of science and public health in favor of corporate interests."
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Musk's xAI Is Showing Us Exactly Why We Need Public Interest Lawsuits
When powerful corporations are able to completely circumvent basic democratic accountability, public interest lawsuits are a final backstop to protect the community’s well-being.
Oct 05, 2025
The NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center are moving to sue Elon Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence company for alleged violations of the Clean Air Act. The company has been accused of illegally operating several dozen diesel-fueled turbines to power Musk’s “Colossus,” a massive data center located on an old industrial lot.
According to SELC, the company operated those generators to power Colossus—and released toxic pollutants—without even applying for a permit to use them.
This entire saga is an excellent example of why public interest lawsuits and strong environmental regulations are critically important. Unfortunately, both are under attack on multiple fronts. The Trump administration and the US Supreme Court have both moved to seriously weaken the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. The White House and the Roberts court, joined by many “supply-side liberals” and proponents of the “abundance agenda,” are also attempting to impeach environmental regulation and public interest lawsuits in the court of public opinion.
Musk’s Memphis misadventures are a case in point of why that’s so dangerous.
No prominent abundance proponent has even attempted to square Musk’s actions with their insistence that we need to remove opportunities to sue to block development.
Colossus went into operation while adroitly sidestepping the democratic process. By dangling promises of tax revenues and economic development, xAI was able to begin operating its massive data center with even some city officials totally oblivious to the process. A company representative who was supposed to speak at a public meeting with the county commission played hooky. Add it all up and it demonstrates how, especially at the local level, powerful corporations are able to completely circumvent basic democratic accountability. In those cases, public interest lawsuits are a final backstop to protect the community’s well-being.
When the government refuses to enforce the laws and allows corporations to run amok, it falls to activists and community groups to force its hand. This is the central premise of Public Citizen founder Ralph Nader’s decades of progressive politics, and something that many centrist Democratic pundits have begun to deride.
What such pundits invariably miss, however, is that despite Nader’s successes, there are still innumerable instances where governments fail to hold powerful corporate interests accountable. In an emblematic example, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue in their bestseller Abundance that, while Nader’s approach was important in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we are now at a juncture where such litigation serves mostly to delay important policy implementation and no longer serves a critical purpose. But for all too many disproportionately poor and majority-minority communities like South Memphis, a public interest lawsuit of the sort denigrated in sweeping fashion by pundits is their last, and honestly only, means of protecting themselves.
The framework deployed by the abundance movement, which is echoed by the Trump administration and the Supreme Court, assumes away instances like xAI in Memphis. Indeed, no prominent abundance proponent has even attempted to square Musk’s actions with their insistence that we need to remove opportunities to sue to block development.
Unfortunately, Musk’s machinations along the Mississippi are part of a longstanding pattern of the government ignoring, and sometimes engaging in, development that poses acute harms to vulnerable—disproportionately majority-minority and poor—communities. South Memphis has been repeatedly left exposed to toxic waste by exploitative industrial practices and government neglect. The Tennessee Valley Authority dumped its toxic coal ash waste there. The same exact site where Colossus now sits once hosted a polluting factory.
And it isn’t just South Memphis. Across the United States, there are abundant examples of communities hung out to dry. The corridor of petrochemical factories between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana, for example, has been dubbed “Cancer Alley” because its residents are subjected to such high levels of carcinogenic pollution. Other areas with heavy fossil fuel infrastructure are called “sacrifice zones” because of how much cancer and chronic disease residents endure.
Even now waste facilities are almost always sited in poor neighborhoods that don’t have the wealth and political capital to block them. Lawsuits are the final bulwark to defend those communities. Calling for them to taken off the table is dangerous, especially with the White House and Supreme Court eager to ape such talking points to justify removing any means of blockading the whims of the powerful.
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'Nightmare Scenario': Watchdog Says AI Cybercrime Shows Vital Need for Regulation
"Countries with lax regulations, like the US, are prime targets for these crimes," said Public Citizen's J.B. Branch.
Aug 28, 2025
The San Francisco-based artificial intelligence startup Anthropic revealed Wednesday that its technology has been "weaponized" by hackers to commit ransomware crimes, prompting a call by a leading consumer advocacy group for Congress to pass "enforceable safeguards" to protect the public.
Anthropic's latest Threat Intelligence Report details "several recent examples" of its artificial intelligence-powered chatbot Claude "being misused, including a large-scale extortion operation using Claude Code, a fraudulent employment scheme from North Korea, and the sale of AI-generated ransomware by a cybercriminal with only basic coding skills."
"The actor targeted at least 17 distinct organizations, including in healthcare, the emergency services, and government and religious institutions," the company said. "Rather than encrypt the stolen information with traditional ransomware, the actor threatened to expose the data publicly in order to attempt to extort victims into paying ransoms that sometimes exceeded $500,000."
Anthropic said the perpetrator "used AI to what we believe is an unprecedented degree" for their extortion scheme, which is being described as "vibe hacking"—the malicious use of artificial intelligence to manipulate human emotions and trust in order to carry out sophisticated cyberattacks.
"Claude Code was used to automate reconnaissance, harvesting victims' credentials and penetrating networks," the report notes. "Claude was allowed to make both tactical and strategic decisions, such as deciding which data to exfiltrate, and how to craft psychologically targeted extortion demands."
"Claude analyzed the exfiltrated financial data to determine appropriate ransom amounts, and generated visually alarming ransom notes that were displayed on victim machines," the company added.
Anthropic continued:
This represents an evolution in AI-assisted cybercrime. Agentic AI tools are now being used to provide both technical advice and active operational support for attacks that would otherwise have required a team of operators. This makes defense and enforcement increasingly difficult, since these tools can adapt to defensive measures, like malware detection systems, in real time. We expect attacks like this to become more common as AI-assisted coding reduces the technical expertise required for cybercrime.
Anthropic said it "banned the accounts in question as soon as we discovered this operation" and "also developed a tailored classifier (an automated screening tool), and introduced a new detection method to help us discover activity like this as quickly as possible in the future."
"To help prevent similar abuse elsewhere, we have also shared technical indicators about the attack with relevant authorities," the company added.
Anthropic's revelation followed last year's announcement by OpenAI that it had terminated ChatGPT accounts allegedly used by cybercriminals linked to China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.
J.B. Branch, Big Tech accountability advocate at the consumer watchdog Public Citizen, said Wednesday in response to Anthropic's announcement: "Every day we face a new nightmare scenario that tech lobbyists told Congress would never happen. One hacker has proven that agentic AI is a viable path to defrauding people of sensitive data worth millions."
"Criminals worldwide now have a playbook to follow—and countries with lax regulations, like the US, are prime targets for these crimes since AI companies are not subject to binding federal standards and rules," Branch added. "With no public protections in place, the next wave of AI-enabled cybercrime is coming, but Congress continues to sit on its hands. Congress must move immediately to put enforceable safeguards in place to protect the American public."
More than 120 congressional bills have been proposed to regulate artificial intelligence. However, not only has the current GOP-controlled Congress has been loath to act, House Republicans recently attempted to sneak a 10-year moratorium on state-level AI regulation into the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The Senate subsequently voted 99-1 to remove the measure from the legislation. However, the "AI Action Plan" announced last month by President Donald Trump revived much of the proposal, prompting critics to describe it as a "zombie moratorium."
Meanwhile, tech billionaires including the Winklevoss twins, who founded the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange, are pouring tens of millions of dollars into the Digital Freedom Fund super political action committee, which aims to support right-wing political candidates with pro-crytpo and pro-AI platforms.
"Big Tech learned that throwing money in politics pays off in lax regulations and less oversight," Public Citizen said Thursday. "Money in politics reforms have never been more necessary."
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Detailed Report Exposes Serious Threat of the Neoliberal, Trump-Lite 'Abundance' Agenda
"With the Trump administration, the Republican-led Congress, and right-wing Supreme Court advancing their attacks on bedrock environmental law, Abundance proponents are sounding more like their echo than their opposition."
Aug 27, 2025
The much-discussed 'Abundance Agenda' is not the solution its proponents claim it be, according to a devastating report published this week by a pair of progressive watchdogsdraw which argues the policy framework is more of a neoliberal Trojan Horse than anything else.
Journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's book Abundance, released earlier this year in the first months of President Donald Trump's second term, was described as a "once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call" to change how the US thinks about problems like housing and the environmental impact of infrastructure projects, with the authors calling on the Democratic Party to fight the Trump agenda with "liberalism that builds."
Instead of getting bogged down in debates over wealth and income inequality or harnessing growing outrage over the hold that the superrich have on the US political system, Klein and Thompson advised the party to reach out to voters by pushing to end the "stifling bureaucratic requirements that killed private sector innovation."
Reining in "burdensome government processes" like environmental and tenant safety regulations—not fighting for programs that would benefit everyone in the US regardless of their wealth or income—was the key to securing "abundance for all," said the authors and their supporters in government, such as Reps. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) and Josh Harder (D-Calif.).
But in addition to beginning their book with a "glaring error," said the authors of a new report by the government watchdogs Revolving Door Project (RDP) and Open Markets Institute on Tuesday—asserting that "supply is how much there is of something" without accounting for the fact that private corporations decide how much of a product they want to sell to make a profit—Klein and Thompson ignore the fact that long before they put pen to paper, right-wing politicians and think tanks were already pushing an "abundance" agenda.
"When abundance-supporting politicians are asked about it, Klein's name is often the first word out of their mouth," said Jeff Hauser, executive director of RDP. "But this obscures the powerful coalition of political pundits, politicians, and think tanks that have painstakingly constructed a national movement around 'abundance' for years before the publication of this book. These interested parties have taken on the more detail-oriented work of actually producing policy for abundance, and it is often far more conservative and destructive than implied in Klein and Thompson's superficial tract."
Klein and Thompson rely on a "dishonest or sloppy" interpretation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which they equate with a permitting law and claim requires drawn-out environmental impact reviews, to make their argument that approvals for new infrastructure should be less cumbersome, said RDP.
The law requires the government to assess environmental impacts before developers can build major infrastructure, and has been heralded as a bedrock environmental statute—but it had been a target of the fossil fuel industry and the policymakers that do its bidding long before "abundance" proponents took aim at NEPA.
"When abundance-supporting politicians are asked about it, Klein's name is often the first word out of their mouth. But this obscures the powerful coalition of political pundits, politicians, and think tanks that have painstakingly constructed a national movement around 'abundance' for years before the publication of this book."
Proponents of "permitting reform"—a tenet of the abundance movement—claim that NEPA is a barrier to clean energy development, but the report finds that renewable energy projects are typically delayed for other reasons and that NEPA oppenents' frequently cited examples of "four- to ten-year timelines to complete a NEPA analysis are the exception, not the rule," as University of Utah law professor Jamie Pleune found in a 2023 Roosevelt Institute report.
Quoting Pleune, the report—titled Debunking the Abundance Agenda—notes that "most delays in the NEPA process are functional, not regulatory."
Pleune explained that most sources of delay are "insufficient staff, unstable budgets, vague or incomplete permit applications, waiting for information from a permit applicant, or poor coordination among permitting authorities." Such delays, however, "can be addressed without eliminating environmental standards, analytical rigor, or community engagement."
RDP's report recounts efforts by former right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia to pass permitting reform legislation in 2022-23, as the Biden administration fought to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, in the interest of getting approval of the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline fast-tracked.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act, which raised the debt limit, expedited the MVP's approval, and codified a number of changes to NEPA—including arbitrary time limits on environmental impact assessments—came out of Manchin's efforts.
NEPA has been credited with protecting crucial wetlands near an industrial facility that was built with with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds; providing a process to explain to the public in Stephentown, New York the greenhouse gas savings that could be achieved if the area's new electrical grid shifted away from fossil fuels-based frequency regulation technology; and ensuring soil and groundwater contamination would be remediated ahead of the construction of a senior living facility in Kansas City, Missouri.
But as RDP noted, throughout Manchin's efforts to roll back environmental assessment requirements and pave the way for the MVP, "abundance proponents... criticized progressive skeptics who warned that weakening environmental review procedures would likely benefit the fossil fuel industry most of all."
Klein argued that “stream-lined permitting will do more to accelerate clean energy than it will to encourage the use of fossil fuels,” because "a simpler, swifter path to construction means more for the clean energy side of the ledger."
He claimed that Democratic opponents to right-wing "permitting reform" legislation lacked their own solutions for expediting the construction of clean energy projects—but soon after he made those claims, lawmakers including Reps. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) and
Sean Casten (D-Ill.) introduced a bill "that would expedite the green transition by facilitating quicker construction of interregional transmission lines, incentivizing renewable energy production on public lands and in federal waters, and increasing grid reliability—all while enhancing community engagement and without giveaways to the fossil fuel industry."
As RDP senior researcher and report co-author Kenny Stancil said, "Abundance advocates erroneously blame environmental review for hindering the clean energy transition, for example, but they have little to say about the real causes of delay, including privately owned utilities' profit-driven opposition to building interstate transmission lines, investors' prioritization of short-term oil and gas profits, and interference from fossil fuel-backed politicians."
The RDP report also points to Klein and Thompson's "indiscriminate anti-regulatory ethos" in regards to their arguments about housing supply, which they argue should be increased by reforming land use policy and loosening zoning rules.
"We agree that it’s a good idea to increase housing supply, and that liberalizing zoning rules is necessary in many places (especially in affluent, low-density suburbs, important locations the book ignores almost entirely)," reads the report. "However, abundance advocates seem to lose their way when they begin to veer away from arbitrary restrictions on housing construction... towards regulations that—in their mind—impede housing development. For instance, zoning can keep polluting industrial activities away from residential areas and ensure adequate infrastructural capacity like water, sewers, schools, and hospital beds for a community."
Klein and Thompson claim that requirements for air filtration systems in housing next to highways raise construction costs and contribute to homelessness, and suggest tenant protections could contribute to housing shortages by making "landlordism less profitable."
"In both cases, abundance proponents prioritize aggregate housing supply above all else, spending little time examining the real
world impact of their policy prescriptions," writes RDP. "What percentage of overall construction cost is the addition of a HEPA air filtration system? Will this requirement truly result in increased homelessness? How much? What are the potential long-term health
benefits and financial savings from having these residents breathe cleaner air? Will this requirement begin to alleviate the dire
racial disparities seen in asthma rates? These questions go unanswered in Klein and Thompson's book."
The Abundance authors also support eliminating land-use regulations in disaster-prone areas, even as hurricane and wildfire threats intensify—a policy that would "not only imperil human life, but it will result in post-disaster housing crises and could threaten the stability of crucial financial institutions."
The real estate investors the abundance movement focuses on maximize profits, which do not always correlate with construction output, said RDP—and centering the interests of landlords and developers who aim to cut construction costs distracts from what RDP calls the only solution that would provide affordable housing for all: social housing, or community-owned housing that exists outside of the private real estate market.
The report details how—although Thompson and Klein may identify themselves as liberals—their abundance worldview mirrors that of commentators and policymakers on the right, from the libertarian Niskanen Center to Trump's own appointees.
The stated mission of Trump's National Energy Dominance Council, chaired by Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, couches its mission in the language favored by the Abundance authors, calling for "improving the processes for permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, and transportation across all forms of American energy"—and has been praised by abundance enthusiasts like author Matt Yglesias.
The administration has also expedited permitting for liquefied natural gas exports while undertaking permitting reforms against clean energy.
"As the report explores, abundance talking points have already been adopted by Trump's energy appointees to justify new fossil fuel projects, while circumventing public participation and transparency in the environmental review process," said Hannah Story Brown, RDP research director and co-author of the report. "With the Trump administration, the Republican-led Congress, and right-wing Supreme Court advancing their attacks on bedrock environmental law, Abundance proponents are sounding more like their echo than their opposition."
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Amid Deregulatory Blitz, Trump Quietly Deletes Key Public Comment Tool
"It's clear that Trump doesn't want the public weighing in on these dangerous deregulatory initiatives," said Katie Tracy of Public Citizen.
Aug 19, 2025
The Trump administration has made it more difficult for consumers, advocacy groups, and small business owners to raise complaints about bad regulations.
On Friday, the General Services Administration—an independent agency that supports the functioning of the government bureaucracy—quietly eliminated a tool known as the POST Application Programming Interface (API) from the Regulations.gov website.
Last Monday, organizations that had previously used the POST system received an email from GSA informing them that "as of Friday, the POST method will no longer be allowed for all users with the exception of approved use cases by federal agencies."
As tech reporter Matthew Gault explained on Friday for 404 Media, which first obtained the email:
POST allowed third-party organizations like Fight for the Future, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Citizen to gather comments from their supporters using their own forms and submit them to the government later.
Regulations.gov has been instrumental as a method for people to speak up against terrible government regulations. During the fight over Net Neutrality in 2017, FFTF gathered more than 1.6 million comments about the pending rule and submitted them all to the FCC in one day by POSTing to the API.
While it is still possible to lodge complaints through the website, Katie Tracy, senior regulatory policy advocate at Public Citizen, says that "the tool offered an easier means for the public to provide input by allowing organizations to collect and submit comments on their behalf."
"Now," Tracy says, "those interested in submitting comments will be forced to navigate the arduous and complicated system on Regulations.gov."
Gault put it more plainly: "The site's user interface sucks. Users have to track down the pending regulation they want to comment on by name or docket number, click the 'comment' button, and then fill out a form, attach a file, provide an email address, provide some personal details, and fight a CAPTCHA."
The GSA has not provided any rationale for why it decided to eliminate the POST system. But Tracy says that making the reporting process more cumbersome is no accident.
"Notice and comment is one of the few opportunities most Americans and small businesses have to shape regulations by telling agency officials how proposed rules benefit or hurt them," Tracy said. "This decision hurts individuals and small businesses–and rewards major corporations and their lobbyists who play the inside game to influence policies outside of the notice and comment process."
"This decision is especially significant amid the Trump administration's efforts to curtail public participation and slash hundreds of safeguards that guarantee clean air and drinking water, safe consumer products, and prevent predatory lending and bank fraud," Tracy added. "It's clear that Trump doesn't want the public weighing in on these dangerous deregulatory initiatives."
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