Generational divides in American politics are nothing new, but they seem particularly striking now as the oldest Millennials turn 40 this year. Charlotte Alter has spent the past four years documenting these interesting political dynamics and joins The McCourtney Institute For Democracy to discuss with the team in this episode of the Democracy Works podcast.
Kevin Frazier warns that one-size-fits-all AI laws risk stifling innovation. Learn the 7 “sins” policymakers must avoid to protect progress.
Imagine it is 2028. A start-up in St. Louis trains an AI model that can spot pancreatic cancer six months earlier than the best radiologists, buying patients precious time that medicine has never been able to give them. But the model never leaves the lab. Why? Because a well-intentioned, technology-neutral state statute drafted in 2025 forces every “automated decision system” to undergo a one-size-fits-all bias audit, to be repeated annually, and to be performed only by outside experts who—three years in—still do not exist in sufficient numbers. While regulators scramble, the company’s venture funding dries up, the founders decamp to Singapore, and thousands of Americans are deprived of an innovation that would have saved their lives.
That grim vignette is fictional—so far. But it is the predictable destination of the seven “deadly sins” that already haunt our AI policy debates. Reactive politicians are at risk of passing laws that fly in the face of what qualifies as good policy for emerging technologies.
Policymakers rightly sense that AI is moving faster than the statutory machinery built for the age of the horse and buggy, not the supercomputer. The temptation is to act first and reflect later. Yet history tells us that bad tech laws ossify, spread, and strangle progress long after their drafters leave office. California’s flame-retardant fiasco—one state’s sofa rule turned nationwide toxin—is Exhibit A. As of 1975, the state’s Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation insisted on flame retardant being included in certain furniture. Companies across the country compiled; it was cheaper to design their products for California’s standards rather than segment their manufacturing processes. Turns out that the flame-retardant foam was highly toxic and highly prone to end up in the hands and mouths of kids. It’s unclear how many hundreds or thousands of kids have suffered severe health issues as a result. Yet, the law remained on the books for decades. If we repeat that regulatory playbook for AI, we will not merely ruin couches; we will foreclose entire classes of life-improving algorithms.
The best way to avoid missing out on a better future due to bad laws is to identify and call out bad policy habits as soon as possible. With that in mind, lawmarks should avoid all seven of these sins and take care to instead adopt more flexible and evidence-based provisions.
Taken together, these antidotes form a simple governing philosophy: regulate like a scientist, not like a fortune-teller. Start narrow. Measure relentlessly. Revise or repeal when evidence demands it. And always, always weigh the cost of forgone breakthroughs—lives un-saved, jobs un-created, problems unsolved—against the speculative harms that dominate headlines.
The payoff? A legal environment where responsible innovators can move fast and fix things, where regulators are nimble rather than reactive, and where the public enjoys both the fruits of AI and meaningful protection from its risks. We need not choose between innovation and accountability. We only need the discipline to avoid the seven sins—and the imagination to envision what humanity loses if we fail.
The final word? If my cancer-spotting start-up withers in a tangle of red tape, the obituaries will never say, “Killed by a visionary legislature.” They will simply say, “Cure delayed.” Our charge as lawyers and policymakers is to ensure that sentence never gets written. By exorcising the seven deadly sins of AI policy now, we can safeguard both the public and the next generation of world-changing ideas. The clock is ticking—let’s legislate with humility, measure with rigor, and keep the door open to the innovations we cannot yet imagine.
Kevin Frazier is an AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Author of the Appleseed AI substack.
U.S. President Donald Trump discusses economic data with Stephen Moore (L), Senior Visiting Fellow in Economics at The Heritage Foundation, in the Oval Office on August 07, 2025 in Washington, DC.
For over 100 years, the Republican Party has stood for free-market capitalism and keeping the government’s heavy hand out of the economy. Government intervention in the economy, well, that’s what leaders did in the Soviet Union and communist China, not in the land of Uncle Sam.
And then Donald Trump seized the reins of the Republican Party. Trump has dispensed with numerous federal customs and rules, so it’s not too surprising that he is now turning his administration into the most business-interventionist government ever in American history. Contrary to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” in the economy, suddenly, the signs of the White House’s “visible hand” are everywhere.
Most recently, President Trump forced Intel, the struggling semiconductor company, to give the U.S. government a nearly 10 percent stake in the company in return for nearly $9 billion in government funding from the Biden administration’s 2022 CHIPS Act. Trump had previously criticized that law, which was part of an industrial policy intended to boost semiconductor manufacturers. Previously, Trump had called for the resignation of Intel’s new chief executive, Lip-Bu Tan, based on vague allegations that Tan had invested in Chinese technology companies that U.S. officials say have links to China’s military (Tan is an American citizen who was born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore).
A week before, the Trump administration had cut another revenue-sharing agreement with the world’s largest semiconductor company, Nvidia, whose chips are critical to the artificial intelligence boom. Oddly, last April, the president had barred Nvidia from exporting its highest-grade H20 chips to China. But after Nvidia agreed to cough up 15 percent of its revenues to the government, Trump relaxed those export rules even though doing so appears to violate the constitutional ban on taxing exports. These were shakedown operations, pure and simple, and President Trump seems to be pretty good at them.
In fact, a month before, in mid-June, the president shook down U.S. Steel and didn’t allow Japanese company Nippon Steel’s proposed acquisition of it to go through. For over a year, during his presidential campaign, Trump had spoken forcefully against this merger. Suddenly, he reversed and approved the merger, once Nippon agreed to allow the Trump administration to receive a “golden share” of the company. More than a regular share, it gives the president of the United States permanent and extraordinary influence over the company, including significant sway over its board and veto power over a wide array of company actions. Activities requiring the president’s approval include closing or idling plants before agreed-upon time frames and transferring production or jobs outside the U.S. The United Steelworkers union, which saw many of its rank-and-file members support Donald Trump for president in 2024, is feeling betrayed.
Last week, Trump boasted on social media that he would “make deals like that for our Country all day long.” In a recent CNBC interview, Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, economist Kevin Hassett, said that the administration is looking to gain stock equity in other companies, including military-related companies. So the White House is clearly not done, as it has announced the creation of a loyalty scorecard that rates 553 companies and trade associations on how well they have supported President Trump's efforts. So what Trump is doing with these companies could soon become a template for dozens of U.S. companies in which the White House demands its golden share.
President Trump has pressed both of his thumbs on the scales of the economy in other ways. For example, he has attempted to fire any economic leaders who don’t agree with him, even those who are constitutionally protected from presidential meddling.
Most recently, he has attempted to fire Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, which oversees important functions such as establishing interest rates, money supply, inflation, and key components of national financial policy. If successful, this act could seriously undermine the trust and confidence of investors and policymakers around the world, since it would demonstrate that the Federal Reserve is no longer independent of the president’s whims and desires, as it was established to be in 1913.
Just recently, a federal appeals court reinstated a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission whom Trump had illegally fired, the court ruling that a commissioner can only be removed for "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." But Trump fired her without giving any reason at all.
He did the same thing previously when he fired a commissioner of the National Labor Relations Board, who was then reinstated by a federal district court. Then the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily stayed the reinstatement while the top court decides the case sometime in the future. Even when courts reverse the president’s clearly illegal decisions, the situation is still intimidating for the harassed commissioners.
So President Trump – the government’s chief executive – is regularly inserting himself into the very heart of the U.S. economy in state-sponsored ways that are alien to traditional Republican values and principles. This signals a huge philosophical shift, not only by Trump but by the Republican Party. Instead of being the “conservative” party, now the White House has fully embraced a kind of “neo-socialist” radicalism combined with an adoption of Silicon Valley’s militant mindset of “move fast and break things” and “do it now and apologize later” (perhaps influenced initially by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s DOGE, before Trump and Musk’s high-profile falling out).
The thing that is doubly ironic is that if a Democratic president did this – engaged in a shakedown of top companies for a government stake in their company, illegally fired top commissioners overseeing the economy, and more – GOP lawmakers and politicians would have been mounting a furious criticism over “government interference.” If a Democratic president had run up the debt to $37 trillion, started a trade war with unpredictable tariffs, fired experts and commissioners who disagreed over his policies, Republicans would have attacked Democrats as “closet socialists.” The GOP House majority may well have drawn up articles of impeachment against a Democratic president.
So President Trump is overturning 50 years of Republican orthodoxy, since President Ronald Reagan said “government is the problem,” and GOP leaders insisted on government playing as small a role as possible in the economy. Now, Trump is partially nationalizing the economy.
President Trump, along with family members, is engaging in other unprecedented practices that impact the economy and raise important issues about conflicts of interest. For years, Donald Trump and his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, showed no interest and were even dismissive of artificial intelligence technologies as well as cryptocurrencies. As recently as 2021, President Trump described cryptocurrency as a “scam.” But suddenly, Trump says he wants to make the United States the "crypto capital of the world."
Why the sudden volte-face? Simple. The Trump family has discovered that “there is gold in them thar hills.” They have launched a family investment strategy beyond their traditional real estate and hotels portfolio, figuring out how to make a lot of money – billions of dollars – in AI and crypto investments.
A few weeks after the White House loosened the Biden administration’s AI regulations, Donald Jr. and Eric Trump invested a lot of money in a new company, American Data Centers Inc., which aims to build high-performance computing infrastructure to support AI, cloud computing, and cryptocurrency mining. This investment positions the Trump family to profit richly from government backing for targeted AI companies, including data center expansion. CBS reports that the Trump family's net worth has increased by $2.9 billion thanks to its various tech-related investments, which now reportedly represent nearly 40% of Donald Trump’s personal net worth. Trump, the Hotel King, is now the Crypto King.
When you combine the Trump family’s self-interest with global tariffs and all the other factors outlined above, it adds to the overall picture that the Trump family is trying to exert a heavy-handed and self-interested role in fundamentally remaking the U.S. economy. President Trump is steeped in overlapping public and private roles like no previous president, with the potential for ethics breaches and even corruption at every turn.
Steven Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.
With many students returning to school in September, educators are preparing their classes for the new year and getting ready for the standardized testing that takes place annually. These standardized tests evaluate students' performance against a set of benchmarks that students typically reach by the end of the year.
According to The Center for American Progress, “These tests measure what students know and can do against common state-developed, grade-level standards.”
A common criticism of state standardized tests is that they can be biased, which can disproportionately impact minority students.
Standardized tests have been criticized for years for being unfair to students of color and those from low-income backgrounds. Still, educators and advocates are now pushing for new approaches, such as project-based assessments and culturally responsive testing, that aim to measure students more fairly.
New York University associate professor Joshua Aronson and his colleagues have examined ways stereotypes interfere with academic performance, according to Learning For Justice.
“Stereotype threat arises in situations where a negative stereotype relates to evaluating performance. So, absolutely, standardized testing is relevant—incredibly so after passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB),” Aronson mentioned.
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a federal law that mandated annual standardized testing to ensure all students met academic standards.
On some occasions, these tests often design questions that assume students have a certain level of background knowledge, and they perform poorly, given that these test questions don't account for the different cultural experiences of marginalized communities.
“A 2015 study argues that individuals interpret test questions based on their values, beliefs, and experiences; for example, Asian and Native American students use different English sentence structures than those found in school textbooks and some standardized tests. As a result, they interpret questions differently and score lower,” mentioned by Prismreports.
Solely addressing biases in these assessments is only part of the issues that these exams can have on the students. Teaching and learning extend beyond just the academic content; it also involves the students' experiences at home. Culturally responsive pedagogy is an approach that connects students’ cultural backgrounds, experiences, and prior knowledge.
“When students have access to culturally responsive pedagogy, they experience academic success and develop cultural competence and the ability to question the current social order, thereby allowing students to gain a sense of empowerment from their history and culture,” according to American Progress.
In states such as New Jersey, organizations like Save Our Schools NJ have emerged, with parents and other public education supporters advocating for every child in New Jersey to have access to a high-quality public education.
Julie Borst, executive director of Save Our Schools New Jersey, discussed the inequalities created by standardized tests, particularly for minority students. Borst highlighted the correlation between test scores and wealth.
“Unfortunately, the ones who are tend to be on the left side of the curve. Tend to be kids who are not wealthy, and kids who are immigrants and English language learners, and have to do really with experience. I think one of the things that people misunderstand when we talk about how standardized testing is not fair to those communities is that they also are thinking that, well, they can't learn, and that's not the case at all.” Borst mentioned.
Borst explained that every child starts at a different place, and so when these tests are administered, they completely disregard any factors related to what is happening in the world. In areas such as Newark, where standardized scores weren’t particularly high, students may have double schedules of English and math, and at that point, the school is primarily focused on improving test scores.
While schools in New Jersey are doing all they can to improve test scores, ChalkBeat Newark has studied where students of color and those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds have experienced the most learning setbacks.
One of the key points raised by Borst is that standardized testing offers little to no useful information for teachers or parents. Parents can’t look at their child’s test scores and identify areas of struggle. If a math score comes back low, the report does not indicate whether the student is struggling with certain concepts, problem-solving, or something else entirely.
Teachers face the same challenge. They are not involved in writing the tests, nor are they ever shown the questions. This can also play a significant factor in decoding words, comprehension, or even learning differences such as dyslexia, according to Borst.
While there are many conversations about potential alternatives to these standardized tests, much like Borst advocates for schools to focus on real-life problems and mini capstones that can prepare students for college and the workplace.
Performance assessments, such as the ones conducted in New York Performance Standards Consortium Schools, have a waiver from all the region's exams except for the English exam.
During their four years in high school, they work on mini capstones, which are performance-based assessments.
“They're doing mini capstones every single year, and they defend them. Those kids are in some of the most impoverished districts in the country, and they go on to four-year college, and they are successful there because high school looks more like what college looks like,” Borst said.
Seventy-one percent of students learning English at consortium schools graduated on time, compared to 37 percent of English learners citywide. The six-year graduation rate for English learners was 75 percent, compared to 50 percent for New York City, as noted by The Hechinger Report.
As a result, they aim to support students in accessing their skill and knowledge levels as part of a high-quality education, as opposed to relying on standardized testing.
While many reform organizations are opposing these standardized tests, there is also an ongoing conversation, as well as a focus on the erosion of the US Department of Education.
“If we're allowed to destroy public education, which is the goal, that's the stated goal, to end it, to end public education as we know it. What does this mean you're creating? You're automatically creating a subclass of people who will work for practically nothing because they can't do anything else. That's what we're creating,” Borst said.
The fight against standardized testing isn’t just about pointing out what’s wrong; it’s about figuring out what can work better for all the students. From New York’s performance-based assessments to local advocacy in New Jersey, there are already examples of schools shifting toward models that reflect students’ skills, cultures, and lived experiences. These alternatives not only prepare young people for college and careers but also provide families and teachers with the kind of meaningful information that standardized tests have long failed to offer.
Nathaly Suquinagua is a bilingual multimedia journalist with a B.A. in Journalism and a minor in Dance from Temple University and a cohort member with the Fulcrum Fellowship.
The Fulcrum is committed to nurturing the next generation of journalists. To learn about the many NextGen initiatives we are leading, click HERE.
Hands holding bars over "Se Habla Español" sign
On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a 6–3 decision from its “shadow docket” that reversed a lower-court injunction and gave federal immigration agents in Los Angeles the green light to resume stops based on four deeply troubling criteria:
The case, Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, is still working its way through the courts. But the message from this emergency ruling is unmistakable: the constitutional protections that once shielded immigrant communities from racial profiling are now conditional—and increasingly fragile.
Es incorrecto—inmoral y cívicamente ilegal—que ICE apunte a personas simplemente por hablar un idioma distinto al inglés. Sin embargo, eso es exactamente lo que permite la reciente decisión del Tribunal Supremo en el caso Noem v. Perdomo. Entre los cuatro factores que los agentes pueden usar para justificar detenciones migratorias en Los Ángeles se encuentra hablar español o inglés con acento—un precedente alarmante en un país donde el español es el segundo idioma más hablado, utilizado por más de 43% de los inmigrantes y casi 68 millones de personas en todo el país.
Seamos claros: esto no tiene que ver con la seguridad pública. Se trata de convertir el idioma en una herramienta de perfilamiento racial, origen y estatus migratorio percibido. Solo en el condado de Los Ángeles, más de 3.4 millones de residentes hablan español. No es una población marginada—es parte esencial del tejido cívico y cultural de la región. Tratar el español como sospechoso es criminalizar la identidad, la herencia y el sentido de pertenencia.
Como hijo de inmigrantes peruanos, crecí navegando entre dos mundos—traduciendo para mis padres, adaptándome en las aulas, y aprendiendo que el idioma podía ser tanto un puente como una barrera. Hoy, al criar a mis hijos junto a mi esposa Adriana, ciudadana naturalizada nacida en Colombia, les enseñamos a abrazar ambos idiomas. Pero ¿cómo explicarles que hablar español en público podría convertirlos en blanco de detención?
La ofensiva policial de la administración Trump comenzó en junio de 2025, con agentes del ICE realizando patrullajes itinerantes por el sur de California. Rápidamente surgieron demandas, citando más de 2300 detenciones —incluyendo ciudadanos estadounidenses y residentes legales— en lugares como estacionamientos de Home Depot, paradas de autobús y obras de construcción. La jueza Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong emitió una orden de restricción temporal en julio, prohibiendo al ICE usar la raza, el idioma, el tipo de trabajo o la ubicación como únicos factores para las detenciones. El Noveno Circuito la ratificó. Pero la orden sin firmar de la Corte Suprema ahora ha levantado esas protecciones.
La jueza Sotomayor, acompañada por los jueces Kagan y Jackson, calificó la decisión de "inadmisible irreconciliable con las garantías constitucionales de nuestra nación". Tiene razón. Este fallo no solo erosiona la Cuarta Enmienda, sino que también codifica la sospecha basada en la identidad. Les dice a millones de latinos, inmigrantes y trabajadores: su idioma, su trabajo, su color de piel y su ubicación son suficientes para convertirlos en blanco.
El caso podría regresar al Tribunal Supremo para una revisión completa. Pero el daño ya está hecho. Y si periodistas, defensores y líderes cívicos no se mantienen firmes, este se expandirá—primero por California, luego por todo el país.
Esta decisión no solo debilita las protecciones constitucionales—envía un mensaje de que la diversidad lingüística es una amenaza, no una fortaleza. Socava los ideales de una democracia pluralista. Les dice a millones de estadounidenses que sus voces—literalmente—no son bienvenidas.
Para familias como la mía, esto no es solo un cambio legal—es una ruptura cívica. Socava la confianza en las autoridades, desestabiliza comunidades y envía al país el mensaje de que los derechos constitucionales son negociables. Que el perfilamiento es política pública. Que la justicia es selectiva.
Estamos enseñando a nuestros hijos a sentirse orgullosos de su herencia, a hablar ambos idiomas, a conocer sus derechos. Pero también les estamos enseñando cómo mantenerse seguros en un país que cada vez más percibe su identidad como una amenaza.
Debemos rechazar la idea de que el inglés es el único idioma legítimo. Nuestra democracia es multilingüe. Nuestras comunidades son multilingües. Y nuestras leyes deben reflejar esa realidad—no castigarla.
¿Qué tipo de país somos cuando la sospecha se basa no en acciones, sino en rostros?
To read the article in English, click HERE.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network.
