This post was originally published on LPE Blog. Read the full post here.
Last month, Senator Ted Cruz introduced the SANDBOX Act, his controversial bill to subsidize the tech industry through systematic deregulation of AI. The bill purports to create something called a “regulatory sandbox.” The reality, though, is that it empowers an obscure White House bureau—the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)—to dole out nearly limitless exemptions from existing rules to individual businesses with little transparency, accountability, or oversight.
One need not be a policy wonk to recognize that the Act’s basic paradigm of using deregulation as a form of dispensing political favors is prone to abuse and antithetical to the rule of law. Yet Cruz’s bill is hardly on the vanguard. Rather, it follows in the well-trod footsteps of the current Trump administration, which has made the innovation of individualized exceptions and waivers one of the signature features of its governing approach.
Early in his administration, for instance, Trump made audacious use of a provision in the Clean Air Act that allows the president to temporarily exempt facilities from complying with the law’s toxic air pollution standards if technology for meeting those standards is not available and if doing so advances national security interests. Instead of passively receiving requests for these exemptions, as the law appears to contemplate, Trump officials actively solicited them, even going so far as to set up an email address (airaction@epa.gov) for industrial facilities to use to make the requests.
Even more brazenly, President Trump has started exempting individual firms from his (likely illegal) tariffs in exchange for political favors. The most prominent example came a few weeks ago when he temporarily exempted the pharmaceutical firm Pfizer from his 100-percent tariff on imported drugs. In return, the company agreed to charge state Medicaid programs lower prices for certain of their products.
On top of all of this, the Trump administration has used the promise of suspending enforcement actions against a wide variety of actors—including, most notably, universities and law firms—to secure greater control over them.
Read the full post on LPE Blog.
