WASHINGTON (TNND) — Lawmakers debating how Congress should regulate the booming artificial intelligence industry are pushing the White House for answers on its vision to push its plan forward amid safety concerns and backlash from the expanding footprint of tech companies to power it.
Michael Krastios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, appeared in front of a House subcommittee on Wednesday to tell lawmakers how the administration is going about the implementation of its AI Action Plan unveiled last year and where it needs Congress to step in.
President Donald Trump has signed a series of executive orders on artificial intelligence as the administration has pushed all its chips in to help advance its proliferation as the country’s next economic juggernaut and stay ahead of China in the race to be the global leader.
Among the executive orders Trump has signed is a controversial attempt to rein in the sprawling list of state-by-state laws that have been enacted in absence of action from Congress. All 50 states introduced legislation on AI in 2025, with 38 of them enacting at least one into law. Critics of the state-level laws argue that it will curb companies’ ability to innovate because they will have to devote more resources to compliance.
The order also directed White House AI czar David Sacks and Krastios create a “federal framework” with Congress. Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, Krastios said the White House would deliver the framework “this year.”
“We want to create a regulatory environment that provides a level of clarity and a level of understanding for all of our innovators,” Krastios said during the hearing. “Creating a one-size-fits-all regulation around AI is not the way that we can best deal with all these new AI technologies.”
Supporters of the moratorium have argued it helps smaller tech companies compete against the tech behemoths that have poured vast sums of money into research and new AI products.
“If you have this tremendous patchwork of laws all across the country, the folks who actually are able to work within that system most successfully are the deep-pocketed large, big tech companies. The small innovators, the entrepreneurs, the people who want to start new businesses, forcing them to try to find a way to comply with 50 different sets of AI rules is actually anti-innovation,” Krastios said.
Lawmakers have been hesitant to pass an AI moratorium despite multiple opportunities to do so. A 10-year stoppage was stripped from the “Big, Beautiful Bill” earlier this year and lawmakers did not include language in the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act despite a push from Trump to do so.
States across the political spectrum have also been opposed to the moratorium, with governors and attorneys general regularly speaking out against a federal ban. The concern is shared among several lawmakers in Congress.
“What we should not do is preempt the states from taking necessary actions to protect their citizens, while here in Congress, we do nothing to pass legislation ourselves,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said during the hearing. Her home state has been a leading force in implementing regulations around the tech.
How strictly to regulate AI and what the specifics of any legislation have been a difficult balance for Congress to find over the last couple years despite repeated pushes to implement some type of guardrails. Potential AI laws also come with overlapping concerns with social media, which is also without long-promised regulations, on issues like data privacy and protecting child users.
Lawmakers also questioned how the administration is going to work with states, utility companies and Big Tech to keep data centers, the lifeblood of the AI industry, from harming the people living in towns across the country where sprawling facilities are popping up. Data centers give AI models the computing power and storage to make them function.
But they have not come without downsides, as data centers have huge electricity demands that have stressed grids and fueled concerns about already rising utility costs skyrocketing to help power AI models. The electricity demands are one of the biggest issues facing the industry’s future amid community backlash to a growing list of data centers scattered around the U.S.
The Trump administration is trying to take steps to minimize the obstacles facing tech companies that want to expand their footprint.
“We want to develop a regulatory environment that allows these products, the sort of standing up of this AI infrastructure to happen and also in a way that doesn’t necessarily adversely affect American ratepayers,” Kratsios said.
Trump said in a Truth Social Post this week that his administration would push tech companies to ensure their data centers don’t drive up their neighbors’ electricity bills. Microsoft this week said it would make policy pledges to prevent its data centers to become a burden on people living nearby.
“We are the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and Number One in AI. Data Centers are key to that boom, and keeping Americans FREE and SECURE but, the big Technology Companies who build them must ‘pay their own way,’” Trump wrote.
The issue has already started to pop up on the campaign trail ahead of the midterms and some lawmakers want to institute a moratorium on construction of new data centers.
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