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regulations
Trump's AI Action Plan Includes 'Zombie' Moratorium on State Regulations
"Republicans and Democrats in Congress overwhelmingly rejected the wildly unpopular AI moratorium," said a spokesperson for Demand Progress, "Now Big Tech is doing an end-run around the democratic process by jamming it through via executive order."
Jul 23, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump's "AI Action Plan," announced Wednesday, revived a sweeping policy that seeks to prevent states from regulating artificial intelligence models.
The provision, which would have put a moratorium on states introducing and enforcing regulations on AI models, was stripped from the Republican reconciliation bill that passed earlier this month, after legislators voted it down overwhelmingly.
Critics have warned that the policy would make it impossible for states to prevent even the most perverse uses of AI technology, including the creation of non-consensual deep-fake pornography or the use of algorithms to make discriminatory decisions in hiring and healthcare.
But with backing from tech investors—including David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto czar, and Sriram Krishnan, the White House's senior policy advisor for AI—Trump is now reviving the "zombie" moratorium via executive order.
Buried within the 23-page document, titled "America's AI Action Plan," is a provision stating, "The Federal government should not allow AI-related federal funding to be directed toward states with burdensome AI regulations that waste these funds, but should also not interfere with states' rights to pass prudent laws that are not unduly restrictive to innovation."
This does not go as far as the initial proposal, which outright banned states from introducing legislation to regulate AI. It more closely mirrors a revised version proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) after the initial measure failed to pass muster with the Senate parliamentarian.
That revised policy instead threatened to withhold funding for broadband internet infrastructure from states that enacted regulations on AI. However, that version was still voted down 99-1 in the Senate.
Trump's executive order modifies this language somewhat to suggest restricting AI funding specifically. It also leaves room for states to pass "prudent laws," though it provides no indication of what is considered "prudent."
More than 140 organizations—including labor unions, consumer advocates, and tech safety groups—have signed onto a letter released Wednesday by the group Demand Progress, which calls on Congress to stop Trump from implementing the policy it has already voted to scrap.
"Bluntly, there is no acceptable version of an AI moratorium," the groups said.
"A total immunity provision would block enforcement of state and local legislation governing AI systems," they continued. "Despite how little is publicly known about how many AI systems work, harms from those systems are already well-documented, and states are acting to mitigate those harms."
In addition to the dangers of deep-fake porn, the groups cited evidence of AI chatbots having sexualized conversations with minors and encouraging them to commit violent acts. They also pointed to systemic racial and gender biases that have resulted in faulty health diagnoses when AI models are used by physicians.
"This moratorium would mean that even if a company deliberately designs an algorithm that causes foreseeable harm—regardless of how intentional or egregious the misconduct or how devastating the consequences—the company making or using that bad tech would be unaccountable to lawmakers and the public," the groups wrote.
In June, the Financial Times reported that "lobbyists acting on behalf of Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta [were] urging the Senate to enact" the moratorium. According to data from OpenSecrets, these four companies alone spent nearly $19 million on lobbying in just the first three months of 2025.
Top Silicon Valley executives, including OpenAI's Sam Altman, Anduril's Palmer Luckey, and a16z's Marc Andreessen, have also publicly championed the moratorium.
Emily Peterson-Cassin, the corporate power director at Demand Progress, said that "this zombie AI moratorium continues Big Tech's relentless drive to tear down commonsense safeguards protecting Americans from half-baked 'driverless' cars and deep-faked revenge porn."
"Republicans and Democrats in Congress overwhelmingly rejected the wildly unpopular AI moratorium," Peterson-Cassin added, "so now Big Tech is doing an end-run around the democratic process by jamming it through via executive order."
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Warren Unveils Framework for Regulating Crypto Industry and Shutting Down Trump's Corruption
"Nobody wants weak crypto rules more than the president of the United States," said the senator.
Jul 09, 2025
As the U.S. House prepares to vote on the latest proposal claiming to regulate the cryptocurrency industry—one that critics say is actually a "cash grab" that will harm consumers—Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday took the opportunity of a hearing on digital assets to outline her five main priorities for any legislation aimed at regulating crypto.
Along with protecting consumers within the crypto market, she said, Congress must pass legislation that safeguards the country from public officials—including President Donald Trump—who want to personally profit from the burgeoning industry.
Those priorities haven't been addressed, she suggested, in proposals like the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act and the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act, which lawmakers are expected to vote on in the coming days.
"I'm concerned that what my Republican colleagues are aiming for is another industry handout that gives the crypto lobby exactly its wish list: the blessing of the government's approval, combined with crypto rules that are weaker than the rules every other financial actor must follow," said Warren (D-Mass.).
Any regulatory framework for the crypto industry, in which investors can use real money to purchase virtual or digital assets and trade them on decentralized, unregulated blockchain technology, must include the framework set up by "the securities laws that have served as the bedrock of our capital markets for nearly 100 years," said Warren—but the CLARITY Act includes language that would allow "non-crypto companies to tokenize their assets to evade the SEC's [Security and Exchange Commission] regulations."
"If we're going to provide rules of the road for crypto, we need to shut down this superhighway for presidential corruption at the same time."
"Under the House bill, a publicly traded company like Meta or Tesla could simply decide to put its stock on the blockchain and POOF! it would escape all SEC regulation," said Warren.
Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) also spoke out against the CLARITY Act's provision on Tuesday, saying the bill would "create a race to the bottom and fuel fraud and financial instability."
With the crypto market growing 15-fold over the last five years, with a $3 trillion market capitalization in 2024, risks to "investors, our financial system, and our national security have also sharply increased," Warren warned in the hearing.
She pointed to FBI findings that Americans lost more than $9 billion to fraud in the unregulated crypto market last year—a 66% increase from 2023‚ and a Chainalysis report that hackers from North Korea were able to steal $1.3 billion from crypto platforms in 2024 as well as $1.5 billion earlier this year.
"Crypto investors should have the same protections from getting scammed or cheated as investors in any other asset," said Warren. "For example, there is no reason that the rules prohibiting stock exchanges from simultaneously serving as brokers and giving preferential treatment to their own trades over their customers' can't be applied to the crypto market too."
Warren also called for legislation that ensures instability in the crypto market won't "infect" the larger financial system by guaranteeing that taxpayers are not on the hook for "risky crypto bets," and that includes commonsense rules to protect national security and fight crime within the industry.
The GENIUS Act, which 18 Democrats joined the vast majority of Senate Republicans in passing last month, did not include anti-money laundering rules or sufficiently close sanctions loopholes, said Warren, with Republicans saying the issues could be addressed in a future bill regarding crypto market structure.
"So this is it. No more kicking the can down the road. Now is the time to solve that problem," said Warren.
Finally, Warren said any bill addressing regulations in the crypto market must "shut down the president's crypto corruption" by prohibiting all public officials from issuing, sponsoring, or profiting from crypto tokens.
Warren's comments came weeks after Trump held a dinner with the top 220 investors in his own $TRUMP meme coin and offered a VIP White House tour to the top 25 mostly anonymous investors—an event that progressive organizers said was "corruption embodied."
"Nobody wants weak crypto rules more than the president of the United States," said Warren, noting that $7 billion of Trump's wealth now comes from his own stablecoin and meme coin, a bitcoin mining company, a "huge portfolio of crypto investments," and includes more than $320 million in fees from the $TRUMP coin—even as the majority of investors in the token lost money.
"If we're going to provide rules of the road for crypto, we need to shut down this superhighway for presidential corruption at the same time," said Warren.
Urging Congress to vote against the CLARITY Act this week, AFR also warned that the "massive deregulatory bill" is backed by "a gusher of campaign cash and lobbying muscle from ultrawealthy venture capital firms and crypto billionaires," with Trump set to "gain the most from this giveaway" after making $1.2 billion in crypto just in the past few months."
"CLARITY (along with related crypto bills being considered) is a custom-built framework that gives him and his billionaire allies a green light to manipulate financial markets," said the group, "while working families are left holding the bag."
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What’s Driving the Republican Party to Climate Murder-Suicide?
Members of the Republican elite know that there is a problem, but rather than take action to lessen it, they do what they can to make it worse.
Jun 29, 2025
In the annals of national suicide, the present dismantling of the American state will surely rank high. It may not reach the apogee attained by Russia in its final Tsarist days or by Louis XVI in the run-up to the French Revolution, but Great Britain’s Brexit hardly smolders compared to the anti-democratic dumpster fire of the Trump regime. Countless governmental, scientific, educational, medical, and cultural institutions have been targeted for demolition. The problem for the rest of the world is that the behavior of Trumpian America is more than suicidal—it’s murderous.
The deaths are mounting. By one accounting, the disruption of overseas food and drug shipments from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), including life-saving HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria treatments, has already caused nearly 350,000 deaths (and they continue at an estimated rate of 103 per hour). Here at home, cuts to Medicaid, as contemplated in the absurdly named “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” would lead to more than 21,600 avoidable deaths annually. And those numbers pale next to the levels of mortality expected to arise from the effects of climate change—a worsening catastrophe that the Trump regime is dead set against doing anything about. Indeed, with an array of policies under the rubric “Drill, baby, drill,” President Donald Trump and his officials seem intent on worsening matters as quickly as possible.
Worrying about how future generations will cope with a savagely inhospitable climate is for losers.
If the World Economic Forum is to be believed, deaths from flood, famine, disease, and other nonmilitary consequences of a hotter, more violent global climate might reach 580,000 per year, or 14.5 million by 2050. And that may be a lowball estimate, according to the American Security Project. Its models assert that warming-induced fatalities are already running at 400,000 annually and are heading for 700,000.
Any way you cut it, that’s a lot of misery. Given that the Trump regime is opening new areas for drilling; aggressively curtailing funding for climate-related programs; purging mention of climate change from government websites and publications; and disassembling the government’s capacity to track, let alone predict climate-change impacts, it makes sense to wonder WHY?
It’s Not Denial
Trump has indeed claimed that climate change is a hoax. He has also said that solar cells should be installed on car roofs. He says a lot of things. His words may be a guide to his state of mind—or his state of con—but they don’t necessarily reflect his or his coterie’s actual beliefs. On the question of climate change, it’s become increasingly clear that the elite of the far-right tacitly accept the reality of climate change. More and more, outright denial is reserved for ramping up the fervor of the MAGA base, who appear willing to believe that a transvestite in the wrong bathroom is more dangerous than fires, floods, and hurricanes.
Project 2025, the much-discussed (and, by Trump, falsely disavowed) 885-page wish list for his administration, reflects the new Republican tone. That blueprint for reversing progressive policies asserted that “the Biden administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.” Notably, however, the document doesn’t deny the existence of climate change. Indeed, in a relatively sober moment that one might wish Elon Musk and his minions at the Department of Government Efficiency had shared, the authors write, “USAID resources are best deployed to strengthen the resilience of countries that are most vulnerable to climatic shifts.” Other, non-lunatic parts of the Republican Party sail by the same tack: They argue more about the particulars of climate solutions than the reality of the underlying problem. Various outspoken and influential Republicans like Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk (all right, in Musk’s case, formerly influential) have taken a similar line.
Your House Is on Fire, So You Pour Gas on the Flames
Let’s get this right: Members of the Republican elite know that there is a problem, but rather than take action to lessen it, they do what they can to make it worse by calling for more oil and gas development, ordering inefficient coal-fired generating stations to stay in operation, and obstructing the growth of renewables. Their excuse for this irrationality, when they even bother to offer one, loosely follows Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s recent testimony before Congress that “the U.S. has ‘plenty of time’ to solve the climate crisis.” How to make sense of this? How do they make sense of this?
The reasons are varied and revealing. First, of course, there’s
• Money: It’s obvious. Contributions from oil and gas political action committees (PACs) to Republicans were more than five times greater than those to Democrats in the last election cycle. And that doesn’t include funds from individual donors connected to the fossil fuel industry or various forms of “educational” soft money, let alone “dark money” channeled through issue-oriented nonprofits that don’t report their sources. There can be no question that total expenditures by fossil fuel interests in the 2024 election far exceeded that sector’s $219 million in traceable investments.
Action to address climate change in a meaningful way would require enforceable restrictions on emissions and/or a heavy carbon tax, both of which are anathema to the right.
• Business Opportunities: One man’s loss is another man’s gain. The thawing of the Arctic and other regions will open new transportation routes and allow access to resources of every kind. Part of the allure of Greenland for Donald Trump, for instance, is the island’s wealth in rare earth metals, which are critical to advanced battery technology and therefore to an array of high-tech and national security applications. If Gaza, demolished and bleeding, can be repurposed as the “Riviera of the Middle East” (to quote President Trump), then imagine what might be done with real estate freed from the bondage of ice.
• Culture Wars: The lines have been drawn for a long time. Solidarity is the key. If you give up too much ground on the climate issue, your challengers will paint you as a RINO—a Republican in name only—and you’ll be suspected of being soft on bathrooms, too. Pretty soon you’ll lose the MAGA faithful, who don’t want to be bothered by talk about issues. They want stand-up, semi-comedic entertainment in which you spray spite and vituperation like an incontinent cat. So, you tell them that worrying about climate change is for sissies and they eat it up. That’s good because it also helps keep you from doubting yourself. You’ve gone down this road much too far to turn back now. The anthropologist Anthony F.C. Wallace offered his “Principle of the Conservation of Cognitive Structure” as a fancy way of saying that, if you pull one brick out of a wall of belief, the whole structure might topple. It’s a reason some people insist on fighting when they ought to switch. They sense the terrifying possibility that, if they dare accept something from outside the echo chamber in which they’ve been living (read: Fox News), they might collapse in a simpering heap.
Wait! There’s More!
• The Short View: There’s a lesson to be learned in how quickly the “best of friends” bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk was cancelled. Apart from the fact that two hyper-narcissistic men in a small transactional space will never last long, it turns out that obsessive self-concern is a prerequisite for thoroughly ignoring the well-being and needs of others. Such a lack of empathy applies to the future as well as the present. If Trump, Musk, Vice President JD Vance, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and crew ever happened to stumble across Robert Heilbroner’s essay “What Has Posterity Ever Done for Me?,” they would undoubtedly agree with the implication of the title, which is surely all they would bother to read. (Heilbroner actually argues the opposite: that care for posterity is a moral imperative.) Trump and his sycophants would say that, since posterity has done nothing for them, they owe it nothing. Bottom line: Worrying about how future generations will cope with a savagely inhospitable climate is for losers.
• Ideology: This is the absolute deal-breaker. An ideology that prioritizes individual freedom over all else—rights untethered from responsibilities—inevitably leads to a hatred of regulation of any sort. If you accept taxation as a kind of regulation that limits your ability to keep all the money that you can get your hands on, you have the full picture. Action to address climate change in a meaningful way would require enforceable restrictions on emissions and/or a heavy carbon tax, both of which are anathema to the right. Worse yet, as climate change is a global problem, international agreements like the Paris climate accord are also necessary and, for conservatives, that smacks of the worst kind of regulation, representing a step toward “extra-national” governance—decisions made by the United Nations or other foreign councils or sets of states, but mainly by people who are not like you.
Then There’s the Craziness of People Who Live on Crazy Street
• Psychopathy (or maybe just psycho): Being willfully unconcerned about an existential threat to civilization requires an exceptional personality, immune to the pangs of compassion and devoid of empathy for others. Such people exist. They have been identified among serial killers, remorseless business executives, and… well, you know, that guy in the White House. The horrific fires last January in greater Los Angeles, which destroyed more than 11,500 homes, presented the nation’s prospective Consoler-in-Chief with an opportunity to salve the region’s wounds with supportive and reassuring words. Instead, then-President-elect Trump, who has never been formally diagnosed with psychopathy but manifests many of its symptoms, opted to castigate California Gov. Gavin Newsom for his water policies. (After his inauguration, Trump ordered a massive release of federally controlled water into southern California, a grandstanding move that produced no benefits for LA’s fire victims, would have conferred no advantage on firefighters had the flames still been leaping, and uselessly depleted water reserves.) Nevertheless, it might be useful to consider the situation from the point of view of Trump and his wealthy right-wing peers: If you have plenty of money, you can live anywhere you want. If one of your houses burns down, you no doubt have another you can move to—or you just build a new one. What’s the big deal?
• Disconnection: This goes deeper than ideology and provides the soil from which conservative ideology grows. Tucker Carlson and other right-wing media stars revealed more than they knew when they accused “environmentalist wackos” and other progressives of drawing a connection between climate change and systemic racism. With customary paranoia they attributed the link between the two issues to liberals’ desire to “control you.” They were dead wrong about the motivation, but the linkage is there.
Climate change invites an ecological view of life on Earth in which human behavior is understood to affect the condition of the planet. If such a problem can be global and the responsibility for it shared, then the people of the world are connected by a common challenge and predicament. Ultimately everyone, like it or not, is in the same mess, and only collective effort is likely to provide a remedy. Once the web of connection is admitted, belief in a special tribe, a superior race, a chosen people, or any other kind of exceptionalism becomes difficult to sustain, and the basis for racism starts looking as hollow as it is. Charles Darwin expressed this understanding a century and a half ago when he wrote, “As… small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men [and of course women!] of all nations and races.”
For people whose sense of self depends on believing that they are separate and superior to others, the ecological view espoused by Darwin and his many successors is anathema. Resistance to it, even at the cost of self-destruction—to say nothing of the cost to others—becomes an endless and vain cry of “Don’t tread on me!” Because this attitude originates deep in the identity of its adherents, prospects for overcoming it may seem dim indeed. Politics, however, are fluid. The tide can shift. The right-wing dead-enders can be outnumbered. They’d better be. The climate clock is ticking.
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