House Ethics launches investigation into Florida Democrat

MIAMI — The House Ethics Committee announced Wednesday that it’s investigating Florida Democrat Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick over complaints that she may have violated campaign finance laws, failed to submit required disclosures and carried out improper hiring practices.

The campaign finance complaint is tied to Cherfilus-McCormick’s special election in 2022 and her reelection campaign that same year, per an official announcement about the investigation.

The progressive Florida lawmaker was elected to Congress when a seat became vacant after the 2021 death of Rep. Alcee Hastings, 84, who was first elected to the House in 1992. She’d previously unsuccessfully challenged Hastings in 2018 and 2020.

The Ethics Committee voted unanimously to investigate the allegations after getting a referral from the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent agency that investigates misconduct complaints.

It hasn’t yet been determined whether Cherfilus-McCormick did anything wrong, and the precise details of the allegations may never become public.

“As the Ethics Committee said in its statement, the mere fact of establishing an investigative subcommittee does not itself indicate that any violation occurred,” said her spokesperson, Jonathan Levin. “Regardless, the Congresswoman takes these matters seriously and is working to resolve them.”

The other allegations cited in Wednesday's announcement include having a person who wasn’t hired by her office handle official work and failing to “properly disclose required information on statements.”

The congressmember also has used funds from her office to run ads — which is allowed but is rare and could blur ethics lines, per Inside Elections.

Anyone is allowed to levy a complaint to the Office of Congressional Ethics, and investigators generally make their findings public only if they determine wrongdoing occurred.

The Office of Congressional Ethics doesn’t have any disciplinary power — that job would instead fall to the lawmaker-led Ethics Committee, only after it's done conducting its own investigation and if it determines ethics laws have been flouted.

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Israeli military says Gaza ground offensive has expanded into urban refugee camps

RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Israeli forces on Tuesday expanded their ground offensive into urban refugee camps in central Gaza after bombarding the crowded Palestinian communities and ordering residents to evacuate. Gaza’s main telecom provider announced another “complete interruption” of services in the besieged territory.

The military’s announcement of the new battle zone threatens further destruction in a war that Israel says will last for “many months” as it vows to crush the ruling Hamas militant group after its Oct. 7 attack. Israeli forces have been engaged in heavy urban fighting in northern Gaza and the southern city of Khan Younis, driving Palestinians into ever-smaller areas in search of refuge.

The U.S. said Israel’s minister for strategic affairs, Ron Dermer, was meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Despite U.S. calls for Israel to curb civilian casualties and international pressure for a cease-fire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the military was deepening the fighting.

“We say to the Hamas terrorists: We see you and we will get to you,” Netanyahu said.

Israel’s offensive is one of the most devastating military campaigns in recent history. More than 20,900 Palestinians, two-thirds of them women and children, have been killed, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, whose count doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants. The agency said 240 people were killed over the past 24 hours.

The U.N. human rights office said the continued bombardment of middle Gaza had claimed more than 100 Palestinian lives since Christmas Eve. The office noted that Israel had ordered some residents to move there.

Israel said it would no longer grant automatic visas to U.N. employees and accused the world body of being “complicit partners” in Hamas’ tactics. Government spokesman Eylon Levy said Israel would consider visa requests case by case. That could further limit aid efforts in Gaza.

Residents of central Gaza described shelling and airstrikes shaking the Nuseirat, Maghazi and Bureij camps. The built-up towns hold Palestinians driven from their homes in what is now Israel during the 1948 war, along with their descendants.

“The bombing was very intense,” Radwan Abu Sheitta said by phone from Bureij.

The Israeli military ordered residents to evacuate a belt of territory the width of central Gaza, urging them to move to nearby Deir al-Balah. The U.N. humanitarian office said the area ordered evacuated was home to nearly 90,000 people before the war and now shelters more than 61,000 displaced people, mostly from the north.

The military later said it was operating in Bureij and asserted that it had located a Hamas training camp.

The telecom outage announced by Paltel follows similar outages through much of the war. NetBlocks, a group that tracks internet outages, confirmed that network connectivity in Gaza was disrupted again and “likely to leave most residents offline.”

Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan said several countries had sent proposals to resolve the conflict following news of an Egyptian proposal that would include a transitional Palestinian government in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. He did not offer details of the proposals.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Israel faces a “multi-arena war” on seven fronts — Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran. “We have responded and acted already on six of these,” he told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

Iranian-backed militia groups around the region have stepped up attacks in support of Hamas.

Iranian-backed militias in Iraq carried out a drone strike on a U.S. base in Irbil on Monday, wounding three American service members, according to U.S. officials. In response, U.S. warplanes hit three locations in Iraq connected to a main militia, Kataib Hezbollah.

Almost daily, Hezbollah and Israel exchange missiles, airstrikes and shelling across the Israeli-Lebanese border. On Tuesday, Israel’s military said Hezbollah struck a Greek Orthodox church in northern Israel with a missile, wounding two Israeli Christians, and fired again on arriving soldiers, wounding nine.

“Hezbollah is risking the stability of the region for the sake of Hamas,” said Israel’s military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari.

In the Red Sea, attacks by Houthi rebels in Yemen against commercial ships have disrupted trade and prompted a U.S.-led multinational naval operation to protect shipping routes. The Israeli military said a fighter jet on Tuesday shot down a “hostile aerial target” above the Red Sea that the military asserted was on its way to Israeli territory.

More than 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes. U.N. officials say a quarter of the territory’s population is starving under Israel’s siege, which allows in a trickle of food, water, fuel, medicine and other supplies. Last week, the U.N. Security Council called for immediately speeding up aid deliveries, but there has been little sign of change.

In an area Israel had declared a safe zone, a strike hit a home in Mawasi, a rural area in the southern province of Khan Younis. One woman was killed and at least eight were wounded, according to a cameraman working for The Associated Press at the nearby hospital.

In response, Israel’s military said that it wouldn’t refrain from operating in safe zones, “if it identifies terrorist organization activity threatening the security of Israel.”

Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 240 others hostage. Israel aims to free the more than 100 hostages who remain in captivity.

Israel blames Hamas for the high civilian death toll in Gaza, citing militants’ use of crowded residential areas and tunnels. Israel says it has killed thousands of militants, without presenting evidence.

At the Kerem Shalom border crossing, U.N. and Gazan medical workers unloaded a truck carrying about 80 unidentified bodies that had been held by Israeli forces in northern Gaza. They were buried in a mass grave.

Medical workers called the odors unbearable. “We cannot open this container in a neighborhood where people live,” Dr. Marwan al-Hams, health emergency committee director in Rafah, told the AP. He said the health and justice ministries would investigate the bodies for possible “war crimes.”

Hamas has shown resilience. The Israeli military announced the deaths of two more soldiers, bringing the total killed since the ground offensive began to 161.

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Congress warns science agency over AI grant to tech-linked think tank

Key members of the House Science Committee are sounding the alarm over a planned research partnership on artificial intelligence between the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the RAND Corp. — an influential think tank tied to tech billionaires, the AI industry and the controversial “effective altruism” movement.

Lawmakers from both parties sent a letter to NIST on Dec. 14 that chastised the agency for a lack of transparency and for failing to announce a competitive process for planned research grants related to the new U.S. AI Safety Institute.

The lawmakers also warned NIST about the quality of AI safety research stemming from outside groups, saying they routinely “hide behind secrecy,” “fail to provide evidence of their claims” and often disagree on basic definitions or principles.

“We believe this work should not be rushed at the expense of doing it right,” wrote the six lawmakers, including House Science Chair Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), ranking member Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and leaders of key subcommittees.

NIST, a low-profile agency housed within the Commerce Department, has been central to President Joe Biden’s AI plans. The White House tasked NIST with establishing the AI Safety Institute in its October executive order on AI, and the agency released an influential framework to help organizations manage AI risks earlier this year.

But NIST is also notoriously resource-strapped, and will almost certainly need help from outside researchers to fulfill its growing AI mandate.

NIST has not publicly disclosed which groups it intends to give research grants to through the AI Safety Institute, and the House Science letter doesn’t identify the organizations at issue by name. But one of them is RAND, according to one AI researcher and one AI policy professional at a major tech company who each have knowledge of the situation.

A recent RAND report on biosecurity risks posed by advanced AI models is listed in the House letter’s footnotes as a worrying example of research that has not gone through academic peer review.

A RAND spokesperson did not respond to questions about a partnership on AI safety research with NIST.

Lucas spokesperson Heather Vaughan said committee staff were told by NIST personnel on Nov. 2 — three days after Biden signed the AI executive order — that the agency intended to make research grants on AI safety to two outside groups without any apparent competition, public posting or notice of funding opportunity. She said lawmakers grew increasingly concerned when those plans were not mentioned at a NIST public listening session held on Nov. 17 to discuss the AI Safety Institute, or during a Dec. 11 briefing of congressional staff.

Vaughan would neither confirm nor deny that RAND is one of the organizations referenced by the committee, or identify the other group that NIST told committee staffers it plans to partner with on AI safety research. A spokesperson for Lofgren declined to comment.

RAND’s nascent partnership with NIST comes in the wake of its work on Biden’s AI executive order, which was written with extensive input from senior RAND personnel. The venerable think tank has come under increasing scrutiny — including internally — for receiving over $15 million in AI and biosecurity grants earlier this year from Open Philanthropy, a prolific funder of effective altruist causes financed by billionaire Facebook co-founder and Asana CEO Dustin Moskovitz.

Many AI and biosecurity researchers say that effective altruists, whose ranks include RAND CEO Jason Matheny and senior information scientist Jeff Alstott, place undue emphasis on potential catastrophic risks posed by AI and biotechnology. The researchers say those risks are largely unsupported by evidence, and warn that the movement’s ties to top AI firms suggest an effort to neutralize corporate competitors or distract regulators from existing AI harms.

“A lot of people are like, ‘How is RAND still able to make inroads as they take Open [Philanthropy] money, and get [U.S. government] money now to do this?’” said the AI policy professional, who was granted anonymity due to the topic’s sensitivity.

In the letter, the House lawmakers warned NIST that “scientific merit and transparency must remain a paramount consideration,” and that they expect the agency to “hold the recipients of federal research funding for AI safety research to the same rigorous guidelines of scientific and methodological quality that characterize the broader federal research enterprise.”

A NIST spokesperson said the science agency is “exploring options for a competitive process to support cooperative research opportunities” related to the AI Safety Institute, adding that “no determinations have been made.”

The spokesperson would not say whether NIST personnel told House Science staffers in a Nov. 2 briefing that the agency intends to partner with RAND on AI safety research. The spokesperson said NIST “maintains scientific independence in all of its work” and will “execute its [AI executive order] responsibilities in an open and transparent manner.”

Both the AI researcher and the AI policy professional say lawmakers and staff on the House Science Committee are concerned by NIST’s choice to partner with RAND, given the think tank’s affiliation with Open Philanthropy and increasing focus on existential AI risks.

“The House Science Committee is truly dedicated to measurement science,” the AI policy professional said. “And [the existential risk community] does not meet measurement science. There's no benchmarks that they're using.”

Rumman Chowdhury, an AI researcher and co-founder of the tech nonprofit Humane Intelligence, said the committee’s letter suggests Congress is starting to realize “how much measurement matters” when deciding how to regulate AI.

“There isn't just AI hype, there's AI governance hype,” Chowdhury wrote in an email. She said the House letter suggests Capitol Hill is becoming aware of the “ideological and political perspectives wrapped up in scientific language with the goal of capturing how ‘AI governance’ is defined — based on what we decide is the most important thing to measure and account for.”

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‘They will be refused care’: Inside an American ally’s decision to warn citizens about the US

OTTAWA — It was a polite Canadian warning from a close friend and neighbor.

But Canada’s updated travel advisory to its citizens, counseling them to be careful about traveling to the United States, set off an international furor last summer.

The message renewed attention over the rightward shift in state-level policies governing abortion and the rights of LGBTQ+ people — a trend that has stirred deep concern in Canada, especially after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

And the previously unreported back story behind the travel communique is even more revealing, exposing the delicate dance of a left-of-center Canadian government as it sought to navigate America’s incendiary cultural politics without imperiling the tightest of alliances.

The travel advisory that went viral was 71 days in the making. Correspondence shared with POLITICO through a freedom-of-information request reveals the change started with a concern raised by federal health department officials about Canadian travelers’ access to emergency care in an era of backsliding U.S. abortion rights.

The internal emails reveal Canada was aware it was an “outlier” among “most-like-minded” countries because its official U.S. travel advice was lacking “some languages on 2SLGBTQI+ issues.”

The U.K. issued an advisory against travel to southern U.S. states in April 2016 over anti-LGBTQ+ laws. Australia updated its advisory with tougher language last year.

Canada, officials believed, had some catching up to do.

The update came shortly after Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly alluded to a “game plan” to manage “a rather difficult situation” if the result of next year’s election puts Donald Trump back in the White House and America on a hard-right, authoritarian path. It’s urgent homework U.S. democratic allies are figuring out.

Friction between the Canadian government and hardline Republicans in the United States is not a new dynamic. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has used the far right as a foil for years, including recently ratcheting up his rhetoric to brand his domestic political rivals as “MAGA conservatives,” linking them to Donald Trump’s political movement.

When Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, Trudeau declared the decision “horrific” and doubled down on abortion rights. He has also spoken out against the rise of anti-LGBTQ+ laws in America making their own imprint in some Canadian provinces.

The official travel advisory, issued on Aug. 29, was more restrained.

“Some states have enacted laws and policies that may affect 2SLGBTQI+ persons. Check relevant state and local laws,” read the August posting from Global Affairs Canada (GAC), employing a term for the broad LGBTQ+ community that is used in Canada.

The language was simple. The bureaucratic process of formulating it was not.

Travel concerns from trans Canadians

The paper trail reveals worries that discriminatory health care policies could be barriers for international travelers from receiving emergency attention.

In the year since the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal on Roe v. Wade, 14 states have declared abortion illegal. A wave of bans have made it harder for transgender youth to receive gender-affirming care in Republican states including Arkansas, Alabama, Arizona and Tennessee.

On June 19, a manager working in Health Canada’s strategic policy branch on sexual and reproductive health emailed two senior Global Affairs Canada department officials, citing concerns from “a variety of sources” about scenarios Canadians could encounter in regions of the U.S. that have enshrined anti-trans hate into state-level laws.

“Pregnant Canadians travelling in certain U.S. states might not receive the kinds of care they'd expect if they run into complications in their pregnancy,” read the email. “And, we're hearing concerns about trans Canadians (and in some cases caregivers travelling with trans youth) who might need to travel to certain states.”

The health department's concern was met with a perfunctory reply a week later.

Cindy Moriarty, Health Canada director general of health programs and strategic initiatives, pressed the foreign affairs department for details about its process for posting travel advisories.

“I'm sure you are as busy as we are — we have limited capacity,” Moriarty wrote June 30. “Depending on what is required we might defer this request until later, but if it's something ‘do-able’ we'd be very interested in pursuing it with you.”

Broken telephone between departments

The deputy director of GAC’s travel information program initially thought Health Canada’s concern was about abortion.

“We haven't been commenting on access to abortion in any country, on the basis that if a Canadian was refused an abortion abroad, they have the ability to come back to Canada to obtain the medical procedure,” the deputy director explained in a June 30 email.

“On the case of the U.S., we wouldn't single them out as access is the worst in a large proportion of foreign countries, so singling [them] out wouldn't be fair or credible.”

Moriarty clarified the issue was not exclusively about access to abortion.

“Our concern is for women with wanted pregnancies who want to carry to term, but may — God forbid — run into trouble,” Moriarty wrote. “A car accident etc. They will be refused care. Some women in some states are dying as a result.”

She said “2SLGBTQ, especially transgender people” are also at risk.

The GAC deputy director ruled the issue outside the program’s mandate. “I wish I could point you in another direction, but can't think of one. I'm sorry.”

Internally, discussions were underway in a separate chain within the foreign affairs department to draft a travel advisory.

Managing Biden administration surprise

Internal emails reveal that on June 26 GAC officials in Ottawa were workshopping the wording of an updated U.S. travel advisory with Canada’s embassy in Washington.

Emails bounced back and forth for the next two weeks. Bureaucrats copied and pasted into the email chain wording used by the U.K. and Australia.

A senior GAC official advised a desk officer to borrow from Australia’s advisory, which states: “There's no federal law that explicitly protects LGBTQIA+ people from discrimination.”

Australia’s tone “seems most appropriate,” Julie Sunday, Canada's top official for consular services, wrote in a July 13 email. Eight business days later, a diplomat in Washington flagged the language as potentially “misleading” because it overlooked case law related to hate crimes. Inspiration from Australia was nixed.

The advisory text was finalized on Aug. 18, though a few hurdles remained.

Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly’s office signed off, but asked if bureaucrats had given the U.S. a heads-up given the anticipated media buzz. The answer was no. Joly’s office requested a hold until their American counterparts could be briefed.

A Canadian diplomat in Washington confirmed a week later that he’d reached a State Department official on Aug. 22.

“The conversation was very matter-of-fact,” read an Aug. 23 email from a GAC desk officer. The brief message is redacted, notably right after the words, “No immediate issues were raised on the call, though mission noted that …”

Joly’s office gave the green light on Aug. 28, a day before the travel warning went live and made news around the world.

This reporting first appeared in POLITICO’s Ottawa Playbook. You can subscribe here.

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Turkey’s parliamentary committee approves Sweden’s NATO membership

The bid still needs to be approved by the full Turkish parliament.

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POLITICO Q&A: EEOC Commissioner Keith Sonderling on AI and employers

The small agency tasked with enforcing workplace civil rights is readying itself for a big role in policing artificial intelligence. And a Republican-appointed commissioner has made it his mission to ensure the agency is ahead of the issue.

“The difference with AI is the scalability of it,” said Keith Sonderling, a member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “Before, you have one person potentially making a biased hiring decision. AI, because it can be done at scale, can impact hundreds of thousands or millions of applicants.”

A Society for Human Research Management survey last year suggested that 79 percent of AI's use in the workplace is already focused on hiring and recruitment. And while Sonderling is in the minority of the five-person commission, he’s been one of its driving forces with respect to AI, taking an interest since 2021 and often speaking out publicly about employers’ obligations in using the new technology.

Like EEOC Chair Charlotte Burrows, he’s emphasized that existing civil rights laws still apply to AI. He wants the EEOC and the human resources sector to take a leading role in showing how the government can deal with the new technology in different settings — and he wants to figure it out quickly.

“You’re dealing with civil rights,” Sonderling, who’s also a former acting head of the Labor Department's Wage and Hour Division, said. “The stakes are going to be higher.”

In a conversation with POLITICO, the commissioner discussed how taking on AI has shaped his role on the EEOC, the commission’s new Silicon Valley focus, and whether you’ll know if a robot unlawfully rejects you from your next job.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

The EEOC is a small agency, and all of a sudden you're managing a pretty major part of this technological revolution and its implementation. To what extent has the introduction of new AI been disruptive to the EEOC? 

It's having a tremendous impact. A critical function of my job as a commissioner is to make all of the parties aware. What I’ve been doing is saying, “Whatever use of AI you're using, here are the laws that are going to apply. Here are the standards that the EEOC is going to hold you to if we have an investigation.”

And you know, for a lot of people who are unfamiliar with EEOC, with employment law, it can have a significant impact to raise compliance. Just because the enforcement hasn't started yet, that doesn't mean the agency doesn't have a role.

The difference with AI is the scalability of it. Before, you have one person potentially making a biased hiring decision.

AI, because it can be done at scale, can impact hundreds of thousands or millions of applicants.

Who are you talking with most about AI? What are those conversations like? 

Since I started looking at this in early 2021, I’ve had an open door that anyone can reach out to us to discuss it because the ecosystem now with AI is much different than what the EEOC is used to.

Before AI, the EEOC was very familiar with four groups, the ones we have jurisdiction over: employers, employees, unions and staffing agencies. That's been our world since the 1960s.

But now with [AI] technology coming in, we have all these different groups: venture capitalists and investors who want to invest in technology to change the workplace, highly sophisticated computer programmers and entrepreneurs who want to build these products. And then you have companies who are looking to deploy these [products] and employees who are going to be subject to this technology.

At the end of the day, nobody wants to invest in a product that's going to violate civil rights. Nobody wants to build a product that violates civil rights. Nobody's going to want to buy and use a product that violates civil rights, and no one's gonna want to be subjected to a product that's going to violate their civil rights.

It’s just a much different scenario now for agencies like ours, who didn't really have that technological innovative component to it prior to this technology being used.

The second part is on the Hill. A lot of legislators are not familiar with how this technology works. I think it's pretty important that individual agencies like the EEOC are constantly working with and providing that assistance to the Hill.

Does the EEOC have the resources to deal with the emergence of AI? Especially given, as you said, the possibility of discrimination being scaled up?

I always do qualify — it's not going to just automatically discriminate by itself. It's on the design of the systems and the use of the systems.

Right now, we know how to investigate employment decisions. We know how to investigate bias in employment. And it doesn't matter if it's coming from an AI tool or if it's coming from a human.

Whether we can ever have the skills and the resources to actually investigate the technology and investigate algorithms — [that] would be a much broader discussion for Congress, for all agencies. Congress [would be the one] to give us more authority. Or more funding to hire more investigators or hire tech-specific experts — that is one thing that all agencies would welcome. Or if they’re going to create a new agency that's going to work side by side with other agencies, that's really the prerogative of Congress, of which direction they're gonna go to skill these law enforcement agencies to deal with the changing technology.

But right now, I feel very confident that if we got any kind of discrimination, whether it’s AI or by human, we can get to the bottom of it. We can use the long-standing laws.

OK, speaking as an employee — because I know one of the places we’re seeing AI the most is in hiring decisions —  is there any way for me to know right now if I didn’t get a job because of AI in hiring discrimination?

Without consent requirements, without employers saying, “You’re going to be subject to this tool, and here's what the tool is going to be doing during the interview,” you have no idea, right? I mean, you just have no idea what's being run in an interview. Especially now with interviews going online, you're on Zoom. You have no idea what's going on in the background, if your face is being analyzed, if your voice is being analyzed.

Take a step back, this is how it's been for a long time. You don't know who's making an employment decision, generally. You don't know what factors are going on when a human makes an employment decision and what's actually in their brain.

We've been dealing with the black box of human decisionmaking since we've been around, since the 1960s. You don't really know what factors are going into lawful or unlawful employment decisions or when there is bias. Those are hard to discern to begin with.

It’s the same thing with AI now. That’s why you're seeing some of these proposals saying you need consent, you need to have the employees understand what their rights are, if they're being subjected to an algorithmic interview.

Should employers be disclosing if they’re using these tools? 

That's something for them to decide.

You can make an analogy: Should employers be required to have pay transparency? The federal government does not require pay transparency in job advertising, but you've seen a lot of states push for pay transparency laws. And what you've seen is a lot of employers voluntarily disclose pay in states they don’t have to. It becomes more of a policy decision for multi-state, multinational employers that are going to have to start dealing with this patchwork of AI regulatory laws.

With the pay transparency analogy, you’re starting to see that a lot of companies across states are saying, “We’re going to do it everywhere.” And you may see that down the road with these AI tools. That's more of a business decision, a state and local policy decision, than it is the EEOC.

Right now, AI vendors aren’t accountable for hiring decisions made by their products that might violate the law. It’s all on employers. Do you see that changing? 

It's another complicated question. Of course, there's no definitive answer, because it's never been tested before in a significant litigation in the courts.

From the EEOC's perspective, from a law enforcement perspective, we're going to hold the employer liable if somebody is terminated because of bias, whether or not it was AI that terminated them for bias. From our perspective, liability is going to be the same either way.

But that does not in any way minimize the potential debate about vendors' liability with some of these state or foreign law proposals, or private litigation. We just haven’t seen that yet.

Should all federal agencies be doing more on AI? 

The more guidance, the more we can do to help employers who are willing to comply is really all we can do. Every agency needs to be doing that, no matter what the context is. [The Department of Housing and Urban Development] using AI in housing, they should put out information for vendors and housing developments using this, and they should also put out information for those who are going to be applying for housing. Same in finance, in credit, OSHA, Wage and Hour for how it's gonna affect compensation — all existing agencies now can be doing more where the technology is already being used.

Regardless of the legislation of this technology moving forward on the Hill, there's still use cases right now. And there's still long-standing laws in the various agencies on how it is going to apply. A lot of agencies are doing that, like the EEOC, like the [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau], the [Federal Trade Commission].

Is there a political divide on that? 

It's bipartisan. Ensuring that violations of the law don't happen is a good thing.

The less enforcement we have on this is a good thing because employees aren’t having their rights violated and employers aren't violating these laws. Everyone can agree on that. Where the debate is on this politically is should we lead with enforcement and make our guidance in the court systems?

I’ve always said we should lead with compliance first. Nobody wants people to be harmed.

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3 American service-members wounded in Iraq

Three American service-members were injured by a drone attack in Iraq on Monday, National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said. One of the three was "critically" injured.

The strike by the "one-way attack drone" was met with U.S. retaliation, according to the statement from Watson, with President Joe Biden ordering American forces to strike multiple targets "focused specifically on unmanned aerial drone activities."

American military personnel in the Middle East have increasingly come under attack in the region since Hamas' intrusion into Israel on Oct. 7 led to an Israeli invasion of Gaza. Commercial shipping in the region has also come under fire.

"The Iranian-backed militia Kataib Hezbollah and affiliated groups, under an umbrella of Iranian-backed militants, claimed credit for the attack," Watson said in the statement Monday night.

None of the three service-members were identified, nor was it specified in which branch of the military they served.

Watson said the Biden administration would consider further counter-strikes.

"The President places no higher priority than the protection of American personnel serving in harm’s way," Watson said. "The United States will act at a time and in a manner of our choosing should these attacks continue."

Biden and first lady Jill Biden spent part of Christmas Day calling American military personnel in Michigan, Hawaii and around the world to offer Christmas greetings and thank them for their service.

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