During Thursday’s House Oversight Committee hearing, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) questioned Bhavin Shah, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Moveworks, about federal AI use.
00:02Thank you very much, Madam Chairman, and thanks to our witnesses for being here.
00:08Mr. Theor, the Trump administration has expressed a goal for the United States to maintain its dominance in AI.
00:15Why is it important for the United States to maintain its dominant position in AI?
00:21Thank you for the question, Congresswoman.
00:23As you've heard here today from several witnesses, we're in a serious race with China and the Chinese Communist Party
00:29for AI supremacy globally, and the broad-based ramifications of who wins that race are significant
00:35for not just our geopolitical security but also our values broadly as a nation and for the world.
00:43And so there's a real danger that if we don't get AI policy right as a nation, that China will take the lead.
00:49Its products will diffuse throughout the world faster, and we're already seeing this.
00:53I was testifying earlier this year at a hearing on the so-called deep-seek moment,
00:56and we saw, surprised a lot of us, including me, how advanced these Chinese systems are today
01:02and how effective they've been at filling gaps globally that America's not there to fill at the moment.
01:06Thanks.
01:07I do think the answer is pretty obvious, but it was important to get something on the record.
01:12Sure.
01:12How has the Trump administration's approach to AI differed from the previous Biden administration's,
01:18and why is the departure from the Biden administration's AI policy necessary, Mr. Theor?
01:23Well, the Biden administration approach was very voluminous in terms of rulemaking.
01:28You know, obviously, the executive order, longest in American history on AI, over 110 pages.
01:34And a lot of it was very fear-based, unfortunately, and didn't embrace the technology as much as
01:38the new Trump administration executive order and subsequent orders have done.
01:42And so I think there's been a real sea change of approach here in terms of understanding the benefits
01:47associated with AI technologies broadly.
01:51Mr. Shaw, your company's been successful at streamlining certain administrative tasks for
01:57businesses in the private sector and helping boost productivity.
02:01How do you see AI technologies like those developed by your company being effectively used in the
02:06federal government?
02:07And what kinds of productivity gains and cost savings could we expect to see?
02:12Thank you for the question.
02:15You know, to put it in maybe legislative terms, you know, imagine you had an assistant that could summarize the status of a bill.
02:23Perhaps maybe look up a constituent problem that you've been tackling before a meeting.
02:28Or being able to search all of your notes and your memos about various committee hearings and tasks that have been assigned.
02:36All of these things are things that AI gives us today.
02:40And the private sector is using this quite aggressively to make their own teams more efficient and effective.
02:48To your question about sort of what that looks like, you know, there's sort of three categories I like to think about scale.
02:53Broadcom, for example, was able to go from 10,000 employees to 50,000 while keeping the same support staff.
02:59So that's another benefit, which is you can take the same team and allow them to support a lot more employees in this case.
03:06But in our case here today, talking about constituents, I think there's also employee time savings.
03:11The city of Glendale, I mentioned, did a 500% plus ROI on their investment.
03:16But that was 3,500 hours of savings from the employees themselves that they could apply and use towards other tasks and functions for their constituents.
03:26And then, of course, there's monetary savings, which is that if we can do some of this more efficiently, that goes back to the U.S. taxpayers.
03:33It goes back into the economy to get spent on further innovation.
03:36Thank you very much.
03:37Ms. Miller, according to the Office of Management and Budget, each year taxpayers provide more than $1.2 trillion or nearly 5% of GDP in funding for thousands of programs across the entire government through grants and other financial assistance.
03:52With so much taxpayer money spent, it should come as no surprise that besides a very high-level accounting, the federal government largely cannot tell whether a particular grant award was used wisely or if it accomplished the stated goals of the grant program.
04:07This committee has worked on legislation such as my bill from 2019, the GRADE Act, to address the problem.
04:14But as we've discovered, there's not enough data available in the proper formats to evaluate whether taxpayer funds given out as grants are being used wisely.
04:23How could AI help us solve this problem and make sure that every taxpayer dollar given as a grant is used effectively and for its stated purpose?
04:32Thanks for the question.
04:33Actually, we did something pretty innovative with my technology company, Tracklight.
04:37We were trying to figure out who one of the agencies that we were working with paid.
04:42And so we got access to minutes of board meetings.
04:47And then we used AI to scrape those minutes and identify vendors.
04:51And then we were able to collect hundreds of vendors that this agency was paying that they didn't know they were paying.
04:57Now, we can all talk about how insane it is that the agency doesn't know who they're paying, which is a serious problem.
05:03But there are ways that AI can help solve this problem and start to sort of piece together who these grants are going to.
05:11And it's incredibly important for taxpayers to know that information.
05:14It would be nice if we could just search things on Fireside.
