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With artificial intelligence threatening to upend workplaces throughout Silicon Valley, the area’s representative in Congress has an idea that he hopes will reduce anxieties about the revolutionary technology: nudge tech companies to take a central role in educating the workforce of the future.
The tense relationship between recent college graduates and AI has been on display at graduation commencement ceremonies throughout the nation, with clips of graduates booing speakers who mention AI quickly achieving viral status. U.S. Rep. Sam Liccardo, whose 16th District includes the headquarters of Meta, Google, xAI and other tech giants, thinks one solution to the nation’s employment anxieties is to invite these firms to create education programs at local colleges and community centers, he said this week in an interview with this publication.
The idea is based on former President Barack Obama’s proposal to give tax credits to companies that invest in programs that allow workers in the Iron Belt and the Appalachia build new skills. Liccardo wants to do something similar with tech companies, with one key addition: a company that hires out of the program would get an additional tax credit.
“You only know they really invested in the program if they’re willing to pay employees that come out of that program,” Liccardo said.
Liccardo has some experience with programs of this sort. As San Jose mayor, he was engaged in discussions with Alaska Airlines on expanding the number of flights to his city. When the airline asserted that it didn’t have enough airplane engine mechanics, it entered into a partnership with California State University in which Alaska Airlines contributed funding to expand the mechanic program. The same model can apply to tech, he suggested.
“I don’t know what the skills and jobs of the future will be 10 years from now, but I’m certain that the private sector is going to know what those skills and jobs are before the public sector does because they’re going to be hiring for them,” Liccardo said. “And so what we needed to do is break down the silos between those employers and the public sector educators.”
The topic of AI disruption has become increasingly contentious in Liccardo’s district, with Amazon, Meta, Intuit and LinkedIn all recently announcing layoffs as they lean into the new technology. Meta has reportedly told its employees that it plans to reduce its global workforce by 10% as part of its embrace of artificial technology. Amid these changes, Liccardo has become an assertive – if moderate – voice on AI legislation, recently penning opinion pieces in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal that oppose stronger regulation of AI models and bans on data centers, respectively.
While data centers face populist opposition in communities across the nation (a recent Gallup poll found that seven in 10 Americans oppose AI data centers in their area, with 48% saying they “strongly oppose” them), Liccardo said he does not want to see a slowdown in their construction. In fact, he’s perfectly willing to let them speed up, provided that the tech companies that build them also invest in renewable infrastructure.
Data center builders currently have to go through the process of getting interconnection permits, which could take between three and five years, he explained. Under his proposal, a company that agrees to invest in batteries and the power grid would win streamlined approval for its data center. This would address many of the concerns from regional power agencies that are worried about energy spikes that result from data centers, which require a high volume of electricity for both operation of IT equipment and for cooling.
“You provide that resilience, and you solve the intermittency problem of renewables, and you also enable their ability to build faster,” Liccardo said.
On the topic of AI safety, Liccardo similarly wants to defer to a large degree to the tech companies that are developing the new technology. In his May 22 opinion piece in the Washington Post, Liccardo argued that the federal government is poorly equipped to effectively regulate artificial intelligence. The industry requires a referee, not a regulator, he wrote.
“A regulator proactively establishes a set of safety rules and requires that a product or service satisfy them to access U.S. markets,” he wrote. “A referee, by contrast, evaluates the state of play in an industry and determines which products are safest. Those safest competitors set the standard by which all market participants obtain the referee’s benefit or sanction.”
Under his proposed legislation, the Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation would define the best safety practices for AI models and then identify companies that achieve these practices. Companies that are deemed safest would earn federal preemption that would shield them from potential liability under state law.
“This approach appears better suited for a fast-evolving technology than a fixed safety regulatory standard,” Liccardo wrote. “As competitive incentives push developers to improve model safety, CAISI would raise its bar to reflect the newest best practices.”
While AI expansion has been a hot topic across the nation, Liccardo said he also wants to see the Congress take more assertive positions on the critical issues of health care and affordability. If the Democrats take the majority in the House this year, one of their legislative priorities should be a bill that would roll back Trump’s tariffs and restore Congressional authority over tariffs, consistent with Article One of the U.S. Constitution, he said. Another priority is extending Affordable Care Acts tax credits, an effort that he said he is currently working on with a bipartisan group of legislators.
“We lost to Donald Trump the second time because not enough Americans had confidence that we knew how to govern better, and we need to demonstrate that,” Liccardo said. “And that means coming out with a very specific set of bills that will address Americans’ ability to afford groceries, pay their rent, and get health care insurance.”
