What kind of tech is in the Budget Bill?

ABC's Mike Dobuski reports on all the tech stuff in the bill

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, it is seven forty. We'll get with Mike Tbuski,

(00:03):
ABC News Technology reporter on the Legacy Retiremergroup dot Com
phone line. So we know that the Senate is doing
the vote rama this morning as we speak on the
Senate floor, trying to get this big beautiful bill over
the finish line by the fourth of July if the
President has his way. But Mike, there's a lot of
technology embedded in this What are you hearing?

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Yeah, So there are two big ideas in the big
beautiful Bill, as it's known, that really are going to
collide with the tech industry in a big way. The
first was, or was going to be the AI moratorium.
This was a provision in the Senate bill written by
Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Ted Cruz of Texas. And
this is still in development, but what the idea was

(00:45):
was that it was going to impose a temporary pause
on state level AI regulation. States couldn't pass any laws
related to artificial intelligence for a set period of time,
and that period's time was originally going to be ten years.
It was then revised down to five years. And the
idea that lawmakers and many in the AI industry had
was that they wanted to prevent this patchwork of legislation

(01:06):
from cropping up across the country that Open AI and
Google and others would have to navigate right. There may
be conflicting laws, it would be kind of confusing, you
might have to get lawyers involved, and all of that
is going to hinder the development of artificial intelligence and
set us back in the AI race that were in
against China. That's what the idea was. However, there were
a lot of critics to this. Many were Democrats, but

(01:28):
also many were Republicans. Seventeen Republican governors wrote to the
Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson calling
for this AI moratorium to be taken out of the bill.
Even in the AI space. Adario Amiday, He's the head
of Anthropic, wrote in an op ed that this measure
is a blunt instrument that gives us the worst of
both worlds, both no ability for states to act quickly

(01:52):
to regulate this quickly developing technology and no federal policy
to act as a backstop, because, of course, there is
no federal regulation of the AI industry as it stands
right now. However, in recent hours, in fact, in the
early morning hours this morning, Marsha Blackburn said that she's
actually stepping away from this, that this is no longer
going to be included in HR one, and she said

(02:14):
that while she appreciated her collaboration with Ted Cruz to
kind of think about this legislation, she said that efforts
to find acceptable language that allows states to protect their
citizens from the abuses of AI. In this current language,
it's not acceptable and those protections need to be there first. Essentially,
that we can't pause states from regulating this technology if

(02:34):
there's not going to be a federal backstop to it.
So that was you know, kind of in the bill.
Out of the bill, a lot of this stuff is
still being voted on, and of course it still has
to go back to the House. This is clearly something
that lawmakers are thinking about. So it's something to keep
an eye on as we go forward.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
Yeah, either the states need to have the regulations or
on a federal level, I would imagine, And if there's
no federal as you call it, a backstop or some
sort of you know, guidelines for AI, then yeah, then
I would say, then let the states decide, but there
needs to be some sort of just guardrails there to
make sure that everybody's kind of on the same page.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
Right, And many were skeptical already even when this was
sort of more realistically in the bill of the argument
that this patchwork of legislation across the country was going
to be this impossible task for Google and Anthropic and
others to navigate. Right. A lot of the state regulations
that have been passed on AI are broadly similar, right,
the govern things like you know, online child sex abuse

(03:32):
material and online elections interference and what have you. They're
all kind of overlapping, not all of them, but like
a lot of them are. So it's not you know,
it's a little hard to kind of wrap your head
around the idea that these huge organizations, again Google navigates
federal regulation around the world, let alone in the United States,
that this would be this sort of impossible task for them.
But you know, that is no longer in the bill.

(03:54):
They may go back to it. It does seem like
Marsha Blackburn and Ted Cruz are interested in this idea
at the very least, But they say things like the
Kids Online Safety Act or other policy frameworks governing online
behavior need to be in place first before they think
about imposing any sort of state level pause.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
Yeah, there's just some obvious common sense things there, as
you point out there with AI that needs to be
banned or blocked or pause. So we'll see how that
all plays out. Speaking with Mike Dbuski, ABC News Tech reporter,
it is take Tuesday, after all. The other thing that's
in the big beautiful build, the electric vehicle tax credit,
is that in or out as we sit now.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
As it stands right now, it's in, but it is
the elimination of the EV tax credit. So, going back
to two thousand and eight, the federal government has incentivized
the purchase of a new electric vehicle. The amount of
that incentive has changed over the years, but the most
recent iteration effectively means that you can get up to
seventy five hundred dollars off the cost of a new
EV in the form of a tax credit if you

(04:52):
purchase a new electric vehicle, four thousand dollars off the
purchase of a used EV, and then there's various leasing incentives.
A lot of this has to do with where the
cars are built and where the batteries come from. Obviously,
cars that are built here batteries that are built here
are incentivized more. That is, no longer it would go away,
you know, under the current text of HR one after

(05:14):
one hundred and eighty days. So it's really setting up
this rush both for you know, manufacturers and for dealers
and for consumers over the next few months here if
they're in the market for an electric vehicle, to rush
out and take advantage of that tax credit, because you
can combine the federal credit with state incentives. Here in
New York where I am, you get a two thousand
dollars electric vehicle tax credit on top of the seventy

(05:36):
five hundred dollars. It's almost ten thousand dollars off the
cost of a new car, and electric vehicles cost a
little bit more than you know, your average you know,
gas powered vehicle generally speaking, fifty five thousand dollars is
the average cost of a new EV. Fifty thousand dollars
is the cost of a new car in general, So
you know, that really does make a difference, it seems like,
and a lot of companies, Tesla included, really relied on

(05:58):
this EV incentive to get people in the door, to
maybe lower that barrier to get people to jump over
to electric power. Now the federal government says that's not
necessary anymore and they're going to get rid of it.
So that is going to be really interesting to see
how manufacturers, consumers, and dealers manage that.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
Well, if they have one hundred and eighty day, there's
going to be a rush to get evs.

Speaker 2 (06:18):
And the leasing stuff goes away immediately too, So like
if you're in the market to lease, well, now is
the time. Even after this passes, it's like, Okay, now
now I'm in the mode to purchase an EV And
that's kind of a different consider