Congress

Kennedy to ask Democrats to confirm him as HHS secretary

Published

2 years ago

January 7, 2025

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead HHS, will meet with Senate Democrats on key health committees this week as he makes his case for why he should lead the sprawling department.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is the ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and also has a seat on the Finance Committee that would vote to approve Kennedy, will meet with Kennedy. So will Finance Democrats Michael Bennet of Colorado, Catherine Cortez-Mastro of Nevada, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Mark Warner of Virginia, per a Kennedy spokesperson.

HELP Committee member Ed Markey (D-Mass.) will also have a meeting as will Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.). The HELP Committee is likely to hold a courtesy hearing.

Why it matters: Kennedy can only lose three Republican votes and still win Senate confirmation so long as the Democratic caucus is united in opposition.

No Republicans have said they’re voting no, but some have expressed concern about Kennedy’s views on vaccines, including most recently the incoming HELP Committee chair, Bill Cassidy (R-La.).

Kennedy has said he doesn’t plan to take away vaccines, but wants to make more data on safety and efficacy available.

Kennedy has met with dozens of Republican senators and will continue this week with meetings with Cassidy and HELP Committee Republicans Jim Banks of Indiana and Susan Collins of Maine. He’ll also meet with Finance Republicans John Cornyn of Texas and Chuck Grassley of Iowa.

Opponents of Kennedy’s confirmation fear he could win a few crucial Democratic votes because of shared views around pharmaceutical companies, environmental protection and food regulation.

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, a former family doctor, is so concerned he flew to Washington from Honolulu to lobby fellow Democrats this week to oppose Kennedy.

“There has been some concern that Fetterman and Sanders have a favorable opinion of some of RFK’s, for instance, anti-Big Pharma positions,” he said.

But Green says he also believes several Republicans are considering opposing Kennedy.

“I suspect there are at least three to five of them who want this to not go to a vote — at least three to five of them, and that number is probably much larger,” he said.

Green said he’s sending his message as a doctor, not a Democrat — and as someone who has seen what Kennedy’s anti-vaccine messaging did in Samoa. More than 80 people died of measles in the U.S. territory in 2019 after anti-vaccine activists stoked unfounded fears about vaccine safety and vaccination rates dropped.

“We had to watch children die,” Green said, blaming Kennedy for helping to drive down trust in the measles vaccine.

What’s next: A Finance Committee confirmation hearing is expected in the coming weeks.

Congress

Sanders to host AI briefing for senators

Published

37 minutes ago

September 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will host a private briefing for senators next week with top artificial intelligence researchers, according to a letter to colleagues obtained by Blue Light News.

The meeting, slated for 4 p.m. on Sept. 16, comes as concerns grow on both sides of the aisle about safety warnings from top AI labs and researchers about the technology’s growing capabilities.

“Congress needs SERIOUS discussions about this issue,” Sanders wrote. “That is why I will be convening a private briefing with some of the leading experts in the world to discuss this recent incident and the extraordinary dangers that AI poses for humanity.”

Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as the “godfather of AI,” is expected to brief the lawmakers alongside MIT professor and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute Max Tegmark and Ajeya Cotra, an independent investigator who helped probe helped probe OpenAI agents’ recent autonomous attack on the tech platform Hugging Face.

Sanders has positioned himself as a leading progressive voice on AI, calling last week for a pause in AI development until a vetting regime can be stood up and a complete ban on superintelligence, a type of AI that may exceed humans’ cognitive capabilities.

Axios first reported details of the briefing.

Congress

Cruz says guardrails needed after dire AI warning

Published

2 hours ago

September 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Sen. Ted Cruz said bipartisan legislation is needed to protect the world from the “catastrophic risks” of artificial intelligence.

The Texas Republican’s Wednesday comments on ABC’s “The View” come as lawmakers in both parties call for more urgent attention to AI safety regulations after a researcher who quit Anthropic on Tuesday said tech giants are “gambling with our lives.”

“I read that whole tweet thread that that developer put out. It was highly concerning,” Cruz said in the interview.

He added, “It reminded me, last year I had Elon Musk on my podcast … and one of the questions I asked him, I said, ‘OK, what are the odds that AI destroys humanity?’ And he looked at me and said, ‘10-20%,’ and I’m like, ‘holy crap.’”

As the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, Cruz holds significant influence over the fate of AI legislation.

Cruz worked with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) last year to pass the bipartisan Take it Down Act, which criminalized nonconsensual intimate imagery, including deepfakes and revenge porn created by AI. Cruz called for more legislation on Wednesday to guard against the “catastrophic risks” of artificial intelligence.

Those risks, which he said include biological and nuclear threats, should require government supervision and approval before they can be implemented. Cruz said he is currently working with Klobuchar and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) to begin to address those dangers through bipartisan legislation.

“This is scary stuff, but we’re also not going to be able to stick our head in the sand and pretend technology isn’t happening. So we’ve got to put some guardrails on it,” he said.

Cruz said the likelihood of such legislation becoming law was “not clear.”

“Amy and John are negotiating right now. It is possible to move bipartisan legislation … but it ain’t easy.”

Despite his concerns about the risks of AI, he said the U.S. needs to lead the world in the technology’s development.

“One of the real challenges is [that] China is going full speed ahead, and whatever we do here, China is not going to stop,” Cruz said. “If there are going to be killer robots, I would rather they be American killer robots, rather than Chinese killer robots.”

In a social media post highlighting his remarks on the show, Cruz added: “If China leads the world in AI, the whole world is in trouble.”

Congress

Lawmakers urge Congress to act after AI researcher’s dire warning

Published

7 hours ago

September 9, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Lawmakers in both parties are escalating pleas for legislative action after an artificial intelligence researcher claimed late Tuesday that unchecked AI models could feasibly destroy the world by the decade’s end — and AI developers know it.

While it’s not the first time experts have warned of the existential threats posed by an unregulated industry that is rapidly advancing, it comes at a moment of heightened awareness on Capitol Hill about the need to reach consensus on AI safety legislation before it’s too late.

“The call is coming from inside the house,” Rep. Lori Trahan of Massachusetts, a House Democrat seeking to lead her party on AI policy, posted on X Wednesday. “Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway.”

She was responding to social media posts from former Anthropic AI researcher Jason Coxon, whose warnings were first reported in the Wall Street Journal.

“I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic,” said Coxon, who specialized in training models. “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

He added: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.”

Adding to the alarm, Evan Hubinger, a top Anthropic scientist charged with ensuring AI aligns with human values and ethics, agreed with Coxon’s characterization of the situation.

“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” he posted. “I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”

Spokespeople for OpenAI and Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but leaders of both companies have engaged with Congress in the not so distant past on the issue. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made a direct plea to lawmakers to impose limits on AI development in a New York Times op-ed last year, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has repeatedly visited congressional offices this year.

Trahan was not the only member of Congress Wednesday to join the calls for guardrails now.

Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu of California — a member of leadership and co-chair of an AI commission that Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries charged with formulating AI policy recommendations — called Coxon’s post “exhibit number 739 for why we need to pass the bipartisan AI Kill Switch Bill asap.”

Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida urged Congress to convene a special session on AI, asserting “not enough of Congress is focusing on this.”

“We MUST be ready,” she wrote. “This is happening whether or not we want it to.”

But lawmakers remain far apart on agreeing to any plan. Trahan continues to push for Congress to pass her bipartisan AI safety bill with Republican Rep. Jay Obernolte of California as members of both parties say it falls short.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who has often been ahead of the pack in calling for strict standards — including his latest proposal that would ban AI superintelligence — declared on social media that 81 percent of Americans believe the government is not doing enough to regulate AI.

“AI threatens our economy, privacy, democracy and the well-being of our kids,” he said. “Congress must stand up to the Big Tech oligarchs and protect the American people.

Sanders’ proposal with House Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) to ban AI superintelligence, however, was widely panned by colleagues who said barring innovation was not the answer.