Washington, D.C. — The Senate budget reconciliation text contains a standalone artificial intelligence (AI) moratorium that affects every state whether or not they accept broadband funding. A new analysis from the Center from American Progress released on Friday, June 13, provides a step-by-step analysis of the AI moratorium and attempts to bring clarity to the mistaken interpretation that the moratorium is optional. The piece analyzes the AI moratorium provisions in the Senate Commerce Committee’s June 5 draft.
The mistaken understanding of the bill likely stems from the proximity of funding-related provisions that proceed the moratorium, but which the moratorium never refers to, and materials from Senate Republicans that imply the moratorium is optional. The AI moratorium should violate the Senate’s Byrd rule, regardless of whether the AI moratorium is standalone or later changed to make broadband funding truly conditional on it.
“Despite some initial confusion, a plain text reading of the initial Senate Republican bill shows that the AI moratorium stands alone as a direct federal prohibition, is not conditioned on any other provision such as whether a state received broadband funds, and immediately goes into effect if the bill becomes law,” said Nicole Alvarez, senior policy analyst on the Technology Policy Team at CAP and author of the column. “Any future changes to the bill to actually condition broadband funding on the suspension of state laws is an acknowledgment that the initial draft was an attempt to disguise this sweeping ban on state AI laws, which are crucial to protect American workers.”
“A standalone AI moratorium almost certainly runs afoul of the Senate’s Byrd rule, which bars provisions that do not affect the budget or whose budgetary impact is merely incidental to their primary policy purpose,” said Bobby Kogan, senior director of Federal Budget Policy at CAP. “Even a narrower version that conditions Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funding on an optional state or local moratorium would likely fail due to the condition being merely incidental to the funding.”
“While much of the focus is on the sweeping AI moratorium, we should not overlook that Senate Republicans are shoving AI subsidies into a law that funds broadband deployments that states desperately need,” said Adam Conner, vice president of Technology Policy at CAP. “Allowing broadband funding to be spent on AI is like taking funding to build new roads and allowing it to be used to buy cars instead. There may be more cars on the road, but they’ll only be able to drive on the existing roads.”
CAP has written previously about the danger of the House AI moratorium and how adding AI to the BEAD funding represents a potential giveaway to Elon Musk.
Read the column: “The Senate’s AI Ban Applies to Every State, Not Just BEAD Recipients” by Nicole Alvarez.
For more information or to speak with an expert, please contact Colin Seeberger at [email protected].