“America’s AI Action Plan,” unveiled by the White House on July 23, aims to accelerate the innovation of artificial intelligence by dismantling regulations and privatizing infrastructure. What the plan does is conflate innovation with deregulation and frame AI as a race to be won rather than a technology to be governed.

President Donald Trump signed three executive orders to ensure that the federal government approves data centers as quickly as possible, promote the exporting of AI models for the sake of American dominance and guarantee that federally supported AI systems are “ideologically neutral” and reject “wokeism and critical race theory.”

In its 24 pages, the plan does not mention “ethics” at all and cites “responsibility” once, in the context of securing AI systems against adversarial attacks. The “Build World-Class Scientific Datasets” section is the only part of the action plan that explicitly mentions human rights: “The United States must lead the creation of the world’s largest and highest quality AI-ready scientific datasets, while maintaining respect for individual rights and ensuring civil liberties, privacy, and confidentiality protections.” However, without protection measures, there is no encouragement for responsible use and deployment.

For example, the plan prioritizes a narrow interpretation of national security without addressing critical ethical needs such as the protection of vulnerable populations, children, neurodivergent individuals and minorities — issues that the European Union AI Act addresses.

And the plan’s only nod to misinformation is framed as a free speech issue. Instead of trying to address it, the plan suggests that references to it should be eliminated: “Revise the NIST AI Risk Management Framework to eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.” Placing misinformation, DEI and climate change in one bucket suggests that these very different things can be treated the same way. The implications of this policy include that Google search, now enabled by AI, might censor references to these topics.

The plan also contains significant accountability gaps. By rejecting “onerous regulation,” the administration effectively green-lights opaque AI systems, prioritizing deregulation over transparency. It does not incentivize processes to help us understand the results produced by AI, enforceable standards or oversight mechanisms.

For example, when AI systems discriminate in hiring or health care, there is no clear answer to questions such as: How did this happen? Who is responsible? And how can we prevent this in the future?

The plan delegates oversight to private corporations, relying on self-policing as a substitute for governance. This hands-off approach mirrors a broader deregulatory playbook: During a May 8 Senate hearing led by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, the Republican from Texas hailed “a light-touch regulatory style” as a key strategy.

This approach to data governance also raises serious concerns about fairness. While it calls “open-weight” and “open-source” AI the engines of innovation, it mandates that federally funded researchers must disclose “non-proprietary, non-sensitive datasets” used in AI research. This creates a double standard: Academic researchers and institutions should share data in the name of transparency, while private corporations are free to hoard proprietary datasets in their ever-expanding data centers. The result is an ecosystem in which public research fuels private profit, reinforcing the dominance of tech giants.

Indeed, rather than leveling the playing field, the plan risks entrenching imbalances in access, ownership, possession and control over the data that powers AI.

Furthermore, by ignoring copyright, the plan invites the unchecked scraping of creative and scientific work, which risks normalizing extracting data without attribution and creating a chilling effect on open scholarship. Researchers might ask themselves: Why publish clean and reusable data if it becomes free training material for for-profit companies such as Meta or OpenAI?

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During his introductory remarks at a White House AI summit, Trump provided the rationale: “You can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book or anything else that you’ve read or studied you’re supposed to pay for.” However, before the recent wave of deregulation, AI companies had begun forming licensing agreements with publishers. For instance, OpenAI’s two-year agreement with The Associated Press signed in 2023 showed that publishers could license high-quality, fact-checked archives for training purposes and also allow their content to be displayed with proper attribution in AI-generated outputs.

Without a doubt, the plan can turbocharge corporate American AI — but likely at the expense of the democratic values the U.S. has long worked to uphold. The document positions AI as a tool of national self-interest and a driver of global divides. While Americans have the right to want to win the AI race, the greater danger is that they might win it on terms that erode the very values the nation has for so long declared to defend.

Mohammad Hosseini, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.

The Flame night club in downtown St. Paul lived up to its name in August 1950.

A fire that started inside the club, which was housed on the ground floor of the Hotel Jewell on Fifth Street, ripped through the five-story building on a Sunday afternoon.

Firefighters quickly gave up on saving the hotel and focused their efforts on rescuing guests and preventing the flames from spreading to neighboring structures.

“Dense smoke pouring from the building made the State Capitol only a blurred image to spectators on the scene,” the Pioneer Press reported the next day. “At Lexington baseball park, spectators standing on the roof could see only the top of the First National Bank building poking up through a layer of smoke.”

Although no one was seriously injured by the blaze, the hotel — located where Osborn370 is today — was reduced to a burned-out shell standing in a pile of rubble.

With losses estimated at $275,000, it was one of the most destructive fires in St. Paul history.

‘Looks like there’s a fire in there’

The fire was first reported about 3 p.m. by a passing motorist, who saw smoke escaping from the offices of the St. Paul Hockey Club, which shared the first floor of the Jewell with the Flame.

“You’d better send someone to the hockey club office,” he told the dispatcher. “There’s smoke coming out under the door and it looks like there’s a fire in there.”

The hockey club and the Flame were both closed, but roughly 85 people were registered at the Jewell.

Hotel staff quickly began evacuating guests while firefighters rushed to the scene. Most of the Jewell’s occupants were able to leave safely, but some made dramatic escapes down fire department ladders.

Thousands of curious onlookers flocked to the burning building as firefighters deployed 30 hoses at once to hammer the flames with at least 6 million gallons of water.

The St. Paul Fire Department summoned all 410 of its personnel to duty — even some who were on vacation rushed back to battle the blaze. They worked late into the night, extinguishing flare-ups with the help of firefighters from neighboring cities.

Totally gutted

A pair of Minneapolis firefighters arrive with hoses outside downtown St. Paul’s Hotel Jewell to aid the city’s fire department in battling the blaze that destroyed the building on Aug. 13, 1950. (Ted Strasser / Pioneer Press)

By morning, the Jewell had been totally gutted and two of its exterior walls had collapsed. Demolition crews worked for more than a week straight to tear down the building’s remains and clear rubble blocking Fifth Street.

In the days following the fire, officials determined the cause was likely a discarded cigarette or faulty wiring in the Flame, which was known at the time for drawing big-name musical acts to its stage.

The owner of the Flame later told St. Paul Dispatch columnist Oliver Towne that he was on a flight home from Chicago when he saw flames from the plane as it passed over downtown.

“My God, that’s my investment going up in smoke,” he screamed.

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There are about 160,000 gas stations in the United States, the vast majority of them built and run through the private sector to maximize efficiency and convenience for motorists. And then there’s the EV charging network overseen by federal bureaucrats that cost American taxpayers $7.5 billion and produced 68 stations with 384 ports.

The contrast couldn’t be more stark.

In 2021, the Democratic Congress passed and former President Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a $1.2 trillion monstrosity larded with pork and payouts to favored green interests. Included among the “investments” were billions to subsidize a national EV charging network in an effort to jump-start the sale of electric vehicles. The Biden White House insisted the program would fund 500,000 EV chargers by 2030.

As is typical of government infrastructure projects today, the program became bogged down in bureaucratic minutiae. Democrats larded the grant requirements with all types of woke nonsense dictating, among other things, where the stations had to be built and who would be allowed to build them. At a Senate hearing last year, a Federal Highway Administration official testified that, after three years, the effort had produced seven charging stations and a “few dozen” charging ports, Reuters reported.

A year later, that number has increased. But the result remains underwhelming. The National Review reported last month that “the Biden administration’s program will have cost approximately $19.5 million per charger once the funding dries up in 2026.”

A recently released report from the Government Accounting Office concluded that the joint office set up by the Department of Energy and Department of Transportation to oversee such projects “generally does not have fully defined performance goals for its activities and, consequently, is generally unable to use the performance information it collects to assess progress toward goals.”

President Donald Trump issued an executive order in February directing states to stop spending the Biden money allocated for EV chargers. This is a step forward for fiscal sanity, given the program’s dismal record. The for-profit sector is capable of meeting demand for EV ports — as Tesla has aptly demonstrated. “Private companies have collectively spent billions on this infrastructure,” The Associated Press reported this year. “Industry leaders say that the demand from drivers for EV chargers will propel companies to build more of them.”

And it’s a sure bet that when these companies fund the construction of new stations and ports, they’ll do it in a timely fashion — and for far less than $19.5 million per charger.

— The Las Vegas Review-Journal

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U.S. Sen. Cory Booker wants Democrats on Capitol Hill to fight harder against President Donald Trump. And accomplish what, exactly?

During a fiery tirade on the Senate floor, the New Jersey Democrat recently accused his own party of being “complicit” in Trump’s ongoing series of constitutionally questionable power grabs — including withholding congressionally mandated funding; gutting federal agencies created via congressional statute; and using the government to intimidate private industry and universities.

“When will we stand and fight this president?” Booker asked, in remarks directed toward his bewildered Democratic colleagues.

The former Newark mayor was just getting started. “The problem with Democrats in America right now, is we’re willing to be complicit to Donald Trump … when we have all the leverage,” Booker, 56, said a few minutes later. Plus: “The Democratic Party needs a wake-up call … It’s time for Democrats to have a backbone, it’s time for us to fight.”

For frustrated Democratic voters, Booker’s comments are probably cathartic. There’s a reason these voters think so little of their party, contributing to its historically low approval ratings.

Except that Booker’s diatribe was misleading. The Democratic Party doesn’t occupy the White House and controls a minority of seats in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Conservatives enjoy a 6–3 supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court. The only leverage available to Democrats in Washington is the Senate filibuster, a product of chamber rules (not the Constitution) that requires most — but not all — bills to garner the support of 60 senators to pass.

So, Booker might be right that Democrats lack backbone. But that doesn’t change the fact that Democrats don’t have the numbers in Congress, or the highest court in the land, to stop Trump from stretching the bounds of executive authority.

“You have tons of internet (and) social media voices screaming that if Democrats would only fight, they’d achieve A, B, or C. Those people either don’t understand how Congress works, can’t count, or are opportunists misleading people,” Brian Rosenwald, a scholar in residence at the Partnership for Effective Public Administration and Leadership Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “Yet, it shapes the base’s expectations to think that Democrats can achieve more than is possible.”

Beyond the politically titillating nature of Booker’s criticism of his own party, his speech attracted attention because it sparked a real-time public debate with fellow Democratic Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.

The backdrop to all of this was a package of bipartisan bills aimed at bolstering local law enforcement. Booker was already on record supporting the legislation, and Klobuchar and Cortez Masto were on the floor pushing for passage. Both sharply rebuked Booker. Their argument, essentially, was that Democrats should govern where common ground with Republicans was possible to avoid penalizing their constituents for Trump’s sins.

“I have been equally vociferous in taking on this administration. But all of these bills came out of the (Senate Judiciary) Committee unanimously and I think they deserve that support on the floor,” Klobuchar responded. (She listed the package’s benefits, including funding for mental health services for law enforcement; combating sexual exploitation; boosting police recruitment; and aiding families of officers killed in the line of duty.) Ultimately, Booker dropped his procedural objection and the bills passed.

Now, Booker does have one point. The Trump administration is withholding congressionally mandated funds, rendering the legislative branch’s Article 1 powers meaningless.

“Democrats and Republicans used to stand up for their turf,” Booker said in defense of his initial objection. In other words, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle used to jealously guard the prerogatives of the legislative branch — the supreme branch, according to the Constitution — against overzealous presidents. And they used to do so even when their party held the presidency. The erosion of congressional power is an unfortunate development that predates Trump.

Booker is hardly the first senator to complain that his powerless party had the power to stop the opposition party’s president, if only it had the will to fight. In 2013, I was a Capitol Hill reporter and witnessed Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas deliver an old-fashioned talking filibuster that lasted 21-plus hours — not unlike the record-long Senate floor speech Booker belted out this past spring. And like Booker’s lament that his party has (supposedly) rolled over for Trump, Cruz back then jabbed at Republicans for insufficiently standing up to President Barack Obama.

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Cruz wanted to bring Congress to a standstill by engineering a government shutdown in a bid to defund Obamacare, aka the Affordable Care Act. But Republicans did not have the power to follow through, despite controlling the House of Representatives — more than Democrats have going for them today.

But Cruz’s quixotic effort did succeed in a couple of ways.

It gave grassroots Republicans the false impression that the GOP could achieve more, legislatively, than was possible through sheer fortitude. It also turned Cruz into a leading 2016 presidential contender, propelling him to victory in the Iowa caucuses. Perhaps Booker, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, is a student of recent history.

Nothing wrong with Booker casting an eye toward 2028, but it might behoove Democratic voters to stay focused on the next election — 2026. Impeding Trump’s agenda requires capturing at least one house of Congress. Doing so would give Democrats some actual — versus imagined — leverage, empowering them to achieve more than emotional catharsis.

David M. Drucker is Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a senior writer for The Dispatch and the author of “In Trump’s Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP.”