Rogers is the “data wrangler” at BillTrack50. He previously worked on policy in several government departments.
IssueVoter is a nonpartisan, nonprofit online platform dedicated to giving everyone a voice in our democracy. As part of its service, IssueVoter summarizes important bills passing through Congress and sets out the opinions for and against the legislation, helping us to better understand the issues.
BillTrack50, which partners with IssueVoter on this project, offers free tools for citizens to easily research legislators and bills across all 50 states and Congress. It also offers professional tools to help organizations with ongoing legislative and regulatory tracking.
Based on our combined work, I will explore deepfake scams in the financial sector.
Following on our in-depth look at artificial intelligence legislation, we're looking at the Preventing Deep Fake Scams Act. Deepfakes are videos of a person that are digitally altered so they appear to be someone else, which creates the possibility of misleading the viewer. Most legislation around deepfakes concerns their use in nonconsensual pornography or to affect the outcome of an election.
This bill is unusual in that it attempts to tackle deepfake use in committing fraud, by establishing the Task Force on Artificial Intelligence in the Financial Services Sector. The task force will explore the benefits to financial institutions as well as the risks to consumer account security and will be chaired by the secretary of the treasury or a nominee. If the bill passes, the task force will be required to produce a report to Congress within a year that will include advice to financial institutions on how to prevent such fraud and also advice to Congress on how to regulate it effectively.
IssueVoter quotes proponents of the bill (the Democratic and Republican sponsors) who highlight the fast-changing nature of the risks that deepfake technology will make identity theft and fraud easier. It also looks at the need for policy makers to understand these risks to be able to create effective safeguards. Opponents of the bill (from the financial sector) cite the benefits and uses of AI to increase productivity and add value, as well as in actually fighting fraud.
The bill was introduced in the House on Sept. 28, 2023, and has been referred to the Financial Services Committee. It's difficult to predict its chances of success, given the current legislative logjam in Congress but, given its bipartisan nature and modest scope, it might manage to become law.
Other AI legislation
Looking at deepfake and AI legislation more broadly, this stakeholder page details 17 of the most interesting pieces of state and federal legislation that actually become law between 2019 and 2022. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2021 requires the Department of Homeland Security to issue an annual report on deepfakes for five years, but with a broader remit than just the financial sector. The first report (from January 2023) serves more as a baseline assessment of the technologies and risks, with more meaty content to come.
On a state level, Virginia was the first to legislate against deepfakes with SB1736 in 2019, with both California and Texas following suit and passing laws prohibiting the use of deepfakes to influence elections. California also passed a law prohibiting the use of deepfakes in pornography without the explicit consent of the subject.
In 2023, many states introduced AI legislation. Here's a stakeholder page detailing deepfakes bills and another setting out bills aimed at regulating their use during election campaigns.
Six states have enacted legislation. Louisiana, Minnesota, New York and Texas have enacted legislation creating offenses for producing and distributing nonconsensual deepfake pornography. Michigan has enacted four pieces of legislation, aimed at creating offenses for distributing deceptive media, regulating campaign advertising, to define artificial intelligence for this purpose and to provide sentencing guidelines. Washington enacted SB5152, defining synthetic media in campaigning and outlines penalties for improper use (for example, where an appropriately prominent disclaimer was not included).
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.