Huiyan Li
WASHINGTON – During a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on April 9, Democratic representatives repeatedly raised concerns that President Trump’s new tariffs and attempts to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act would harm U.S. competitiveness in artificial intelligence (AI).
“Republicans constantly talk about winning the AI race, but the actions they’re taking may appear as if they're purposely trying to lose that race,” said Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.).
The U.S. remains at the forefront of foundational AI research, largely driven by its innovative tech industry and ability to draw top talent from around the world. However, experts cautioned that this lead is fragile and the gap is closing.
The January release of the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s R1 Model challenged the U.S.'s long-standing dominance in AI development, as the model rivals the most recent American reasoning models at only a fraction of the cost.
Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO and chair of the Special Competitive Studies Project, stated that outcompeting China is not only an economic goal, but also a strategic imperative for America to “preserve American economic dynamism, military superiority, and global influence.”
Pallone, the ranking member of the committee, stated that Trump’s tariffs would increase the cost of materials the U.S. needs for the AI competition, such as steel and aluminum.
Starting last month, the Trump administration imposed a 25% tariff on imports of steel and aluminum products from all countries, restoring Section 232 of the US Trade Expansion Act of 1962.
Higher material costs could drive up expenses for building data centers and the transmission infrastructure that supplies electricity to them. The experts said these facilities are essential, and more should be built to advance AI.
Tariffs are already affecting AI-related industries. U.S. memory chipmaker Micron Technology announced on Tuesday that it would raise prices on some products starting Thursday due to President Trump’s new tariffs.
Manish Bhatia, executive vice president of global operations at Micron, was also on the witness panel. When Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) asked him about the price increases, he responded vaguely, saying, “Tariffs are an evolving situation.”
David Turk, a former deputy secretary of the Department of Energy under the Biden administration, stated that the tariffs imposed by President Trump introduced an immense amount of uncertainty that could deter near-term investment in powering AI.
“Folks who are planning data centers want certainty. They want stability of policy so they can plan on the floor. Tariffs are absolutely the worst if you want to bring on additional data and additional energy for data centers,” said Turk.
Turk added that Trump’s pledge to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides tax incentives, grants, and loans for clean energy, could discourage energy investment and drive costs even higher.
“We also need to be honest with ourselves right now. The quickest power, the most affordable power to bring onto our grids, including for data centers, is renewables and storage,” said Turk.
In 2025, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projected that 93% of new electricity capacity additions would come from renewable sources (solar and wind) and energy storage.
As the U.S. prioritizes meeting the surging energy demand driven by AI, Turk said it was the wrong time to make it more expensive to bring new electricity online, urging Congress to retain these important tax grants and loan tools.
Some Republicans disagreed.
“We are not going to do it with renewables because we just don’t have the time to build all you have to build out, including the transmission lines,” Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) said.
Palmer noted that a significant number of power generation facilities in the U.S. were shuttered and dismantled; however, the transmission lines from those facilities still remain. He suggested that the quickest way to meet energy demand would be to deploy small modular reactors that can be plugged into the existing transmission infrastructure.
Schmidt, former CEO of Google, agreed that small modular reactors could be a good solution. However, he stressed that none exist yet in America, and under the current regulatory structure, it could take 12 years to get one approved.
“We need a new program around much faster permitting for safer and safer fission and fusion nuclear SMRs as the correct path,” said Schmidt.
Huiyan Li is a reporter for Medill News Service covering business & technology. She is a journalism graduate student at Northwestern University specializing in politics, policy, and foreign affairs.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.