Press Releases

Washington, D.C. (April 2, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered remarks at the Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust hearing examining how Donald Trump dismantled key Artificial Intelligence (AI) safeguards and attacked independent regulators, leaving Americans vulnerable to the growing dangers of unregulated AI.

Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, at today’s subcommittee hearing.

WATCH  Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks.

Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust
Hearing on “Artificial Intelligence: Examining Trends in Innovation and Competition”
April 2,2025

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to our witnesses.

It’s hard to think of an antitrust matter more pressing than concentration in the AI market. The dominance of a handful of AI companies presents a long-term threat to our national security, our democracy, our privacy, and basic fairness in the marketplace. 

But President Trump has plunged our government into chaos and disabled the federal agencies that we depend on to address such problems. It will be difficult to effectively respond to dangerous market concentration in the corporate assembly of all human knowledge if we have governmental power that is dangerously concentrated itself in the president to the exclusion of Congress as the lawmaking branch and the judiciary as the defender of Constitutional rights and values.

Over a century ago, Congress established the Federal Trade Commission. It was created as an independent agency to enforce antitrust and consumer protection laws outside of the controlling pressure and power agendas of any one president or any one party. 

For more than 100 years, the FTC has protected Americans against scams, fraud, and other unfair and deceptive practices. The FTC has also promoted and protected competition in the marketplace, which benefits consumers, workers, and small businesses, driving innovation in business and democracy without monopoly.

Congress designed the FTC to be led by five commissioners across party lines who serve seven-year terms, are subject to Senate confirmation, and can only be fired for cause. Congress structured this independence to ensure that the FTC would serve the nonpartisan interests of the American people and be insulated from partisan political control and monolithic corporate agendas.

Over 90 years ago, the independence of these Commissioners was tested and the Supreme Court unanimously reaffirmed that the President cannot unilaterally fire an independent FTC commissioner without cause. Unitary executive power violated the careful federal design and infringed Congress’s lawmaking power to establish the FTC as an effective and balanced instrument for the common good.

Yet, President Trump chose to violate federal law and defy the Supreme Court’s longstanding precedent by attempting to fire—without cause—the two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission. He did so to end the nonpartisan independence of this FTC and make sure it responds to his momentary political demands above the national public interest.

Accordingly, the Commissioners have brought suit to reverse this unlawful firing, and to, as commissioner Slaughter stated: “make sure that . . . the work of the commission is done without fear or favor, and more specifically, that we can take on the biggest companies in America without fear of getting fired for failure to do a favor to the President's friends or donors or corporate allies" 

The strongest federal rules on AI were established by President Biden in a 2023 Executive Order. The Trump Admin reversed that executive order that laid out guardrails for the AI industry. Not content with this rollback, the President has now hobbled and undermined the lead cop on the AI beat, the FTC, which has for years been at the forefront of holding Big Tech, including the AI industry, to account.

It’s hard to debate the proper scope of regulation in this space when Donald Trump has reportedly granted Elon Musk unlimited access to our most private and sensitive records—data that is undoubtedly invaluable to xAI, his AI company. Today, none of us here know whether Elon Musk is using Americans’ data, classified information, and other sensitive information from databases across government to train his company’s AI models and gain an unfair advantage over competitors and citizens. Musk has refused to answer our many requests on this topic—and now he has crippled the agency charged with investigating these very kinds of tech abuses.

Even if we came together and found agreement on regulatory reforms and safeguards for AI development and use, we still now lack an expert independent agency to enforce our solution.

The President and Trump are ushering in a new regime in which monarchical power, cronyism, corruption, and sycophancy rule. He is using his office to enrich himself, his friends, and his donors, all at the expense of the people. 

His attempted firing of two FTC Commissioners, and his subsequent removal of any FTC resource that might serve as a check on Big Tech, illustrate how the President is dismantling the machinery of government to serve his own ends.

Our constitutional order is under attack to concentrate all political power in the president. It’s the political equivalent of what we’re trying to prevent in the economic sphere. I hope that our witnesses can give us their best insights as to how to deal with this problem, but we're facing a structural crisis now in our government.