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Politico
a day ago
- Politics
- Politico
5 questions for Sen. Todd Young
Hello, and welcome to this week's installment of the Future in Five Questions. This week we interviewed Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), one of the Senate's leading voices on tech policy and a key architect of 2022's CHIPS and Science Act. Young, who earlier this year published an essay in The National Interest proposing a 'Tech Power Playbook for Donald Trump 2.0,' discusses his skepticism about the value of social media, the insight of Alvin Toffler's 'Future Shock' and why America risks falling behind China on biotech. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows: What's one underrated big idea? Using our tech diplomats at the State Department to accrue more geopolitical power as a country. We saw in the CHIPS and Science Act that this group of individuals, which I characterized as our special teams — it was football season when I put this together — they can help shape norms of use, develop standards and even help us gain market share. To the extent we advance our tech in different geographies, we're advancing our values, because our values around privacy, consumer protection, transparency and many other things are embedded within the standards of our different technologies. If the Trump administration and others adopt this approach, I think we can force our adversaries, most obviously the People's Republic of China, to have to produce in a bifurcated way. They produce one set of standards and embedded technologies for their domestic economy, where they'd spy on their own people, and then they'd have to produce for another set of standards for export. Because they have an export oriented economy, they couldn't sustain two different streams of production and they'd have to choose. What's a technology that you think is overhyped? Social media, without any question. I'm the father of four young children, and I don't think it is meaningfully, or on balance constructively, enhancing their lives. Actual social connection in person with people, or even by phone, is preferable to the sort of clickbait culture and abbreviated means of communication that we've all become accustomed to. I think it has diminished our attention span, I think it has coarsened our culture and I think it's made us dumber collectively than we would have thought in a universe in which we have instant access to all kinds of information. As I talk about this topic with regular citizens — that is, those who don't own major social media companies or work at Washington, D.C., think tanks — there is an appetite for certain smart regulatory approaches. However, in the last few years I think there's been a heightened awareness of the potential when you regulate to constrain speech, and a general skepticism of regulators' intentions and ideologies and good faith in trying to intermediate conversations. When I entered the public fray, I think there was an appetite — or maybe a missed window of opportunity — to come up with a better model through law. It's really challenging right now, because we've become, in many ways, a nation of distinct tribes not just in terms of our political identification but our belief system. There's a distrust of efforts to sort out fact from fiction and to referee the public square, and private actors have seized control of the public square through these social media outlets. We haven't figured out how to address that in a pluralistic, highly populous and dynamic democracy, and we're going to have to come up with answers at some point. What could the government be doing regarding technology that it isn't? Unleashing the power of biomanufacturing, which is something I've been deeply immersed in for the last couple of years as chairman of a national security commission on emerging biotechnology. Other countries have invested heavily in this. Notably, China is more advanced than the United States in some of these areas. The epicenter of this biomanufacturing revolution could be in heartland states like Indiana, using agricultural feedstocks to put into tanks and manufacture many of the components and products that are made through conventional manufacturing right now. McKinsey estimates that today, the technological capabilities exist to biomanufacture 60 percent of items that are conventionally manufactured. What we need is scale in order to make these things cost-competitive, and we offer recommendations for Congress to achieve this sort of scale. What book most shaped your conception of the future? Alvin Toffler's 'Future Shock' had a big impact on me. It talked about something that is now familiar to every American: the disjunction between technological change and human adaptation to those changes. We are essentially living the anxieties that Alvin Toffler predicted from a world upended by increasingly rapid technological change. It impacts our psyche. It impacts our relationships. It impacts our professions; it profoundly impacts every facet of our lives and is therefore unsettling and disorienting. Toffler labeled this whole gamut of effects and emotions 'future shock,' and I don't believe he gets frequent enough mention or credit for identifying this profound change that was underway. The other one is Alexis de Tocqueville. In 'Democracy in America' he talks about how democracy shapes our way of thinking about ourselves in such profound ways, and how it permeates everything in our culture. In this time of tectonic political shifts we are — unless we discipline ourselves against it — inclined to ascertain what is right and true based on what our neighbors think rather than conviction, or trenchant analysis. If any person who lives in a small-'d' democratic culture thinks that they're not susceptible to this, they're wrong. That cultural milieu is put on steroids in an era of social media and, more generally, a fractured media environment in which people live in tribal echo chambers. We all are hardwired in our DNA to want to be part of the crowd. None of us wants to be lonely, and we look to others for guidance about what is right. So you can think again about how in this populist political age, members of the different parties have fundamentally changed their views over the past few years on some pretty foundational political issues. Setting aside some calculation from politicians here and there, there is a sincerity to it because people are persuaded by the popular opinions of people within their tribe. So you've seen a swapping of policy positions across parties on some really foundational things, and some have genuinely arrived at those new positions through analysism but others are more impacted by democratic culture than is typically realized. What has surprised you the most this year? Well, if we're going 365 days back, it would be Indiana University football's No. 5 ranking in the College Football Playoff era. But in this year, it's the Pacers' deep run in the playoffs, and it ain't over. doge rolls on Although Elon Musk is personally stepping back from government, DOGE remains at furious work. POLITICO's Robin Bravender, Danny Nguyen and Sophia Cai reported Thursday on how Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought is quietly directing lasting changes to the federal bureaucracy, which one anonymous White House official described as the 'true DNA of DOGE': The staffers made political appointees at various agencies who can remain at their posts indefinitely. DOGE staffers are also taking a quieter approach to cutting programs and staff by going to lesser-known departments and agencies, even as courts often stymie their changes. During the last two weeks, DOGE has tried to access the Government Publishing Office, the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights, and sent teams to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the Government Accountability Office. 'Everyone's more nervous about [Vought] than Elon actually, especially because he knows government a little bit better,' an anonymous federal worker told POLITICO. 'While people are excited that Elon is gone, this doesn't change much.' a new berkeley supercomputer The Department of Energy announced a new supercomputer project, teaming with Nvidia and Dell on a system to support physics, artificial intelligence and other types of research. POLITICO's Chase DiFeliciantonio reported for Pro subscribers Thursday on the announcement of a computer based at Berkeley, California's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, which has around 11,000 researchers. Scheduled for completion in 2026, the computer will be named after Nobel Prize-winning CRISPR scientist Jennifer Doudna. 'AI is the Manhattan Project of our time, and Doudna will help ensure America's scientists have the tools they need to win the global race for AI dominance,' said Energy Secretary Chris Wright in a statement. In response to a question from reporters, Wright defended the administration's broader science cuts. 'Politics and bureaucracy are the antithesis of science,' he said, adding that 'this administration is 100 percent aligned with speeding up and energizing American science, removing the shackles, removing the bureaucracy, cleaning out the politics, and focused on science and progress.' post of the day THE FUTURE IN 5 LINKS Stay in touch with the whole team: Derek Robertson (drobertson@ Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@ Steve Heuser (sheuser@ Nate Robson (nrobson@ and Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@
Politico
12-02-2025
- Business
- Politico
A future-minded Republican senator launches an uphill battle
Presented by A key Senate Republican with some big ideas about tech is calling for Trumpworld to reconsider some of its basic governing premises. Writing Monday in the realist international relations magazine The National Interest, Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) — an architect of the CHIPS and Science Act — made an exhaustive case that in order to keep America's place as the global tech leader, the second Trump administration might have to embrace spending and diplomacy at a level it has so far shunned. 'If America leads smartly to strengthen our industrial base and enhance our economic resilience, our allies and partners will follow, and our adversaries will quake,' Young wrote in what he called the 'Tech Power Playbook for Donald Trump 2.0.' 'The promise of America First will be fulfilled.' While conveyed with Trump-friendly rhetoric and bluster — and seemingly aligned with the America-first tech vision that Vice President JD Vance touted in Paris yesterday — Young's ideas differ in crucial ways from other major players on the Trumpian right. Elon Musk is engaged in a single-minded cost-cutting project. Steve Bannon continues to preach his gospel of isolationism. Young, a second-term senator from Indiana and heir to that state's legacy of technocratic, yet still pointedly conservative governance, argues instead that if America really wants to ensure supremacy on AI over China and the triumph of American values abroad, it needs a muscular State Department and well-funded federal research infrastructure. That's a seemingly counterintuitive program for the modern GOP, but one that's earning praise from tech-focused thinkers on the right. 'Senator Young has been consistently ahead of the curve on AI's enormous geopolitical implications,' Samuel Hammond, chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, told DFD, calling Young's worldview 'appropriately paranoid' about the risks of China winning the AI race. It's not just Young's fellow tech-first Republicans who lauded the document: Oren Cass, founder of the anti-libertarian American Compass think tank, praised its 'focus on leveraging our economic power rather than blindly embracing globalization,' and the Brookings Institution's Mark Muro called it a 'compelling argument.' Maintaining both a Biden-era spending package and good relations with allies are likely to be a tough sell — to say the least — for a Trump administration seemingly more concerned with dismantling the administrative state and taking back the Panama Canal. But Young's document represents one of the most thorough attempts yet to ground Musk and Trump's star-spangled vision of interplanetary techno-supremacy in real-world policy, and tackle the more prosaic problems that need to be solved for it to achieve liftoff. The 'playbook' undergirds its global ambition with a domestic spending program. Young, as an author of the CHIPS and Science Act, is clearly chagrined at Congress' failure to appropriate the billions of dollars in research spending it authorized. 'Congress should act swiftly to fully fund the authorities of the 'and Science' portion of the bill' to 'out-compete and out-innovate' competitors, he writes, and 'help more innovators commercialize their research and present options to the world that are not tainted by the authoritarian designs of the CCP.' Is anyone in Congress listening? It remains to be seen whether there's an audience for big ideas about the American future from anyone not named Trump or Musk. A Young spokesperson said in an email that 'Senator Young has had conversations with colleagues about the importance of science funding, particularly how important it is to our national security.' Meanwhile, current negotiations over the budget center around border security and military funding, while Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has called for massive cuts at agencies, including the National Science Foundation where the bulk of the 'and Science' funding was promised. Ars Technica reported last week that cuts to the NSF budget in Trump's forthcoming budget request could be up to 66 percent. When it comes to diplomacy, Young clearly believes in Trump-style sticks as much as carrots. He calls in his blueprint for a strong, active approach to enforcing export controls against China on AI and other advanced technologies, arguing that 'growth in the U.S. market catalyzed by the CHIPS Act will help offset restrictions on selling into the Chinese market.' He lays out a wonky plan for the State and Commerce Departments to work together using offices and funding established under the CHIPS and Science Act to ensure compliance, and for America to 'keep working with like-minded allies and partners while utilizing commercial and trade advantages wherever possible to develop a liberal, democratic market for technology that reinforces our values — privacy, transparency, safety, property rights, freedom of speech, and religion.' To a certain kind of MAGA Republican, that might sound suspiciously like the 'globalism' that Trump made his first political hay in part by railing against. At the same time, even for tech-friendly moderate Democrats the pitch's pointed hawkishness toward China and invocation of the Reaganite 'we win, they lose' mentality could make it a hard pill to swallow. For now, Young's path forward is unclear. In response to a query about whether it will continue the International Technology Security and Innovation Fund that Young cites as a key tool for diplomacy — and which was set up through CHIPS and Science — a State Department spokesperson said 'As a general matter, we do not comment on congressional communications and correspondence.' And with the administration's all-out trade war against geopolitical foes and allies alike, the prospect of multilateral collaboration on tech and economics seems to fade each day. All this means that Young and the otherwise Trump-friendly thinkers who support him might, for the moment, be swimming upstream politically. Still, they seem to be placing a bet that when the shock-and-awe of the first 100 days wears off, and the everyday burden of governance sets in, the administration will ultimately come around to their way of thinking — that the AI and semiconductor race provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and responsibility, to roll up their sleeves and get to the bureaucratic dirty work required to fit geopolitics to American values. FAI's Hammond described the document as an attempt to bring Republicans back around to 'grand strategy,' a foreign policy concept associated with the post-World War II era that demands such a sweeping program aimed at establishing multi-generational hegemony. 'If we lose the AI race to China, it will be more a failure of statecraft than raw technological capability,' Hammond said. If AI turns out to be as powerful a world-changing tool as Vance proclaimed it in Paris Tuesday, Young and his allies are betting a return to that level of statecraft will be necessary to make sure America guides it. Christine Mui contributed to this report. doge at gsa Employees at the General Services Administration are chafing at the Silicon Valley-style approach DOGE is taking to their workplace. POLITICO's Danny Nguyen reported today based on conversations with three anonymous GSA employees that staff fear 'career-ending' consequences should they not answer questions to DOGE's satisfaction. One project manager said people are trying to play up their technical skills because 'They don't think DOGE people respect the softer 'moving complex projects through government bureaucracy' types of skills.' The staffers said DOGE representatives did not indicate what happens next after these interviews. One data scientist argued that the chainsaw Elon Musk seemingly wants to take to the GSA could be counterproductive for the mission of modernizing government IT systems, although the staffers believe they are most likely to keep employees who engineer and ship code. One supervisor familiar with DOGE leadership's thinking said its vision for the agency likely reflects 'a Silicon Valley mental model of 'pour all the data into a [language learning model] and then replace all the jobs with AI.' europe pivots on ai The AI Action Summit's reframing of the global AI discussion earned cheers and boos as it came to a close Tuesday. POLITICO's Morning Tech Europe reported this morning on the response from industry and digital rights groups, as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen made a pitch that the EU is 'innovation-friendly' and open for business. Industry was happy — to a certain extent. OpenAI's chief lobbyist Chris Lehane told reporters he was encouraged by von der Leyen's remarks, but he still wants more out of the EU's regulatory framework: 'Attracting the global capital to invest in infrastructure in those places is really going to require a regulatory framework here that will allow for this part of the world to be able to develop and build its own AI ecosystem so that the economic model can justify the investment into that infrastructure.' On the other hand, digital rights groups saw European regulators as caving to industry pressure. Blue Duangdjai Tiyavorabun, policy adviser at the nonprofit advocacy group European Digital Rights, said that EU tech czar Henna Virkkunen was 'caving in on pushback against EU's tech laws … she fuels deregulation, appeases U.S. and tech corporations, while ruining civil society's few, but hard-won human rights victories in the AI Act.' post OF THE DAY The Future in 5 links Stay in touch with the whole team: Derek Robertson (drobertson@ Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@ Steve Heuser (sheuser@ Nate Robson (nrobson@ Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@ and Christine Mui (cmui@
