Nov. 11, 2024, 5:36 p.m.
After fighting off a challenge in his Senate race and with Republicans set to take over the majority in the next Congress, Sen. Ted Cruz is in line to take over the powerful Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, giving him extraordinary influence to shape federal technology policy during the next two years.
This will be Cruz’s first time leading a committee, creating a lot of unknowns about how the lawmaker best known for his loud heckling of Democratic policies and regulations will handle the job of crafting policy and pulling together bipartisan coalitions in order to pass legislation.
Based on his past stances, Cruz is expected to put a hold on regulation for artificial intelligence and national data privacy. Instead, the committee will likely focus on protecting kids online and hauling big tech CEOs onto Capitol Hill to testify about alleged censorship of conservative speech online.
Cruz has been an ardent critic of most proposals to regulate artificial intelligence, often arguing that the government will slow down innovation of the new technology.
“Cruz, for the most part, has been a very strong free market advocate on a lot of different policy issues, and in particular on AI has been one of the most forceful voices in Congress in favor of a more light-touch, pro-freedom approach to artificial intelligence,” said Adam Thierer, a resident senior fellow at the conservative R Street Institute.
This spring, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, along with Sens. Mike Rounds, Todd Young, and Martin Heinrich, released a bipartisan AI road map that proposed some broad goals for AI regulation and investment that Schumer and his team thought Congress could reasonably accomplish. It called for up to $32 billion in annual nondefense AI spending and supported the CREATE AI Act, which authorizes the creation of a federal cloud-computing resource that will allow smaller companies and universities to develop AI programs.
While a lot of work on AI was done by Schumer’s bipartisan quartet, they were far from the only lawmakers proposing industry regulations last year. A competing proposal— brought up by Sens. Michael Bennet, Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, Josh Hawley, and Lindsey Graham—was the creation of a new tech regulatory agency geared for the specific challenges of AI regulation.
Cruz voiced strong complaints about the idea of a new agency.
“When you think of hubs of innovation, you rarely think of government bureaucracies as the source of them,” he said after a Senate AI Forum in September 2023. “We don’t want to see American AI innovation operated like the [Department of Motor Vehicles].”
The future of a data-privacy bill
Beyond AI regulation, Cruz taking the Commerce gavel likely means the country will go at least another two years without a federal data-privacy standard. Though there is little to show for it so far, the last two sessions of Congress have seen strong efforts by current Senate Commerce Chair Maria Cantwell, as well as her House counterparts, Reps. Frank Pallone and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, to pass a national data-privacy bill.
Cruz has largely not played a part in negotiations on the privacy bill, and he has seemed skeptical about such a step, particularly Democratic demands for a private right to action allowing individuals to sue tech companies if they violate the law.
“I cannot support any data privacy bill that empowers trial lawyers, strengthens Big Tech by imposing crushing new regulatory costs on upstart competitors or gives unprecedented power to the [Federal Trade Commission] to become referees of internet speech and DEI compliance,” Cruz said in a statement after Cantwell and Rodgers revealed the American Privacy Rights Act.
Some experts in privacy policy say they hope he’ll continue to work on data privacy once he has the gavel.
“Cruz is a conservative ... but there's been a lot of conservatives who are still very interested in privacy,” said India McKinney, director of federal affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-civil-liberties advocacy organization.
But many activists doubt Cruz would be able to work through the fights over private right of action and state preemption that have killed data-privacy bills for years—even if he wanted to.
“It's very hard,” said Adam Kovacevich, the founder and CEO of the tech-backed Chamber of Progress, noting that “the last two years laid bare pretty significant differences” between Republicans and Democrats on data privacy.
Protecting kids online
When it comes to social media, Cruz has been a loud critic of big tech companies, routinely accusing them of censoring conservative speech and causing harm to children online.
To protect children online, Cruz supported both the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act. Both bills passed the Senate with a significant amount of support, but they are not expected to receive a floor vote in the House during the lame-duck period.
Cruz also has his own bill, known as the Kids Off Social Media Act, that would ban anyone under 13 from going onto social media and ban tech companies from using recommendation algorithms for anyone under 17. Versions of all three bills will likely be brought up again next Congress.
Amy Bos, the director of state and federal affairs with the tech-backed advocacy group NetChoice, said she hopes Cruz learns from the series of court cases that have struck down state social media laws and produces something “more narrow in scope.”
“He is a free-market, limited-government kind of guy,” Bos said. “Hopefully they can rework the legislation from the past Congress and look at ways to make it constitutional and pass muster there.”
Beyond legislation, many expect Cruz to hold a series of high-profile hearings focused on the alleged ills of big social media companies.
“I definitely think we're going to see the big, flashy hearings,” McKinney said.
Cruz has long subscribed to the idea that social media companies are censoring conservative speech. In February 2023, while in his current role as ranking member on the Commerce Committee, Cruz launched an investigation into Meta, Google, Twitter, and TikTok, investigating how their algorithms may have blacklisted or de-emphasized conservative speech.
Multiple studies have found no evidence that conservatives face extra censorship online.
Kovacevich said that beyond grabbing headlines, those hearings likely won’t have a major impact on how the social media world operates.
Cruz, he added, knows “he's not going to get anything through Congress on [content moderation], but he’s a masterful troll and he'll use his chairmanship to hold those kinds of hearings.”
A thorn in Trump’s side?
Part of the Commerce Committee’s role is not just oversight of tech companies, but oversight of the administration, a potential source of one of the rare differences Cruz may have with the incoming Trump administration.
During the campaign, Donald Trump said he would exert so-far unprecedented control over the Federal Communications Commission. He also threatened to have his FCC pull the licenses for ABC and CBS because he did not like their coverage of him. While the FCC does not license national broadcasters, the agency does have control over mergers and could be used to go after companies Trump disapproves of with a variety of regulations.
Some hope that Cruz would use his oversight position to fight back against the potential abuse of these government agencies by the Trump administration.
“I would find it hard to believe that Senator Cruz would go along with those sorts of efforts to expand the powers of the administrative state to get back at certain companies or perceived enemies,” Thierer said.
Kovacevich laughed at the idea that Cruz would push back against the Trump administration if it attempted to abuse the authority of the FCC.
“Trump will bring in the Trump welfare standard,” Kovacevich said. “His approach clearly is: ‘Is this company nice to me?’ I can see Ted Cruz taking the same approach, too.”
Cruz as Commerce chair likely rings the death knell for Cantwell’s Spectrum and National Security Act, which renews the FCC’s authority to auction off bands of radio frequency while also funding the Affordable Connectivity Program. The now-expired ACP was designed to help households significantly below the poverty line gain internet access.
Cruz has his own bill that would renew the FCC’s spectrum auction authority and would actually require the agency to auction off more spectrum than Cantwell’s bill does. But the bill does not include funding for the ACP, of which Cruz has been highly skeptical. In December, he was one of four lawmakers who sent a letter to the FCC questioning the agency’s management of the broadband program.
In a successful attempt to block a planned markup of the Spectrum and National Security Act, Cruz introduced 38 amendments aimed at drawing the bill into a greater culture-war fight.
The amendments included an attempt to eliminate the National Science Foundation’s chief diversity officer, and to block ACP funding for states that banned gas stoves and for households that include someone arrested at a college protest.
"We had a chance to secure affordable broadband for millions of Americans, but Senator Cruz said, ‘No,’” Cantwell said after the markup was canceled. “Rather than fixing our internet security issues, creating more broadband competition, and fostering cooperation between defense and commercial users, Senator Cruz instead is stoking culture wars.”
The incident highlights the biggest question many have for him in his likely new role at the head of the Commerce Committee. How will someone who has spent most of his time in Congress as the vocal opposition do once he is actually in charge?
“If you're in the minority, you don't actually have to figure out how to build anything. All you have to do is yell about how you don't like what the majority is doing. But if you do have the gavel, if you are in control, it is up to you,” McKinney said. She added that Cruz is clearly smart enough to do the coalition building, that it is just a matter of whether he wants to or not.
“There are a lot of people who are really good at throwing bombs, but nation building is a different thing than just being feisty,” she said.
