A Dearth of Common Sense
People want certainty.
Dentons report: AI investment trapped by regulatory uncertainty
AI is expensive. People will experiment until they figure out what works. We’re not there yet.
But it’s difficult to justify the expense when you don’t know what the regulatory landscape will look like.
‘ But regulatory uncertainty is creating inactivity risk
69% are delaying important AI investment decisions due to an expected increase in regulation.
73% are concerned that inconsistent AI regulation will have a major impact on their organisation and its growth strategy.
63% do not have a formalised AI roadmap in place.
65% believe organisations that fail to embrace AI-driven change are increasingly unviable’
The Answer To Bureaucratic Delays To Intel’s Chips Act Funding
Government announces spending investment bonanza, citing strategic threat of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the dominant player in leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing.
Companies respond in kind, building new plants on the assumption that some or much of the funding will come from the feds.
Funds never arrive.
‘“We are disappointed by how long and how slow the dispensing of funds has been and it’s well over two years at this point. I’ve invested 30 billion in capital and we’ve seen $0 of the grants at this point. So we do believe that that has been too slow, and we’re somewhat frustrated by that.”’
Just who is the king of D.C.’s bureaucracy?
Administration makes its fourth attempt at student loan forgiveness, despite repeated losses at the Supreme Court.
Badges? I don’t need no stinking badges!
‘The Education Department says its proposed rule would authorize forgiveness for some eight million borrowers experiencing “hardship.”
‘Under the rule, the department can discharge debt if it calculates a borrower has an 80% likelihood of defaulting on payments within the subsequent two years based on 17 factors such as income, debt balances and assets.
‘The rule would effectively let the department forgive debt of any borrower any time it wants. The administration says high child-care costs could qualify as a hardship. How about high auto loan or credit-card payments? Did someone say moral hazard?’
How Trump vs. Harris Could Shape Asset Management Regulation
Industry wants regulation to be a “noun,” not a verb.
‘The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) would similarly be targets for Trump. The SEC tends to have two commissioners from each party and a chair from the president’s party, but this arrangement is only tradition and there is no guarantee that Trump would adhere to protocol. A fully stacked SEC would have few checks and balances and would essentially be under the control of the White House. FINRA closely mirrors the SEC, so this situation would also have a profound impact on its own agenda.
‘One of the key markers of the Biden administration has been strict enforcement. Chair Gary Gensler has been a particular advocate of this, and his SEC has seen record breaking fines. The asset management industry is likely to want the SEC to back off, given the ‘regulation by enforcement’ approach has been met with a steely response.
‘“The asset management industry and the banking industry want the same thing, which is for regulation to be a noun, with focus on policy and rulemaking and less focus on the action of enforcement,” said Sacks.’
“It’s a regulation,” administrators say. But sometimes it isn’t.
People overinterpret regulatory requirements. This sclerosis builds over time.
‘“It really is a good idea to take a step back and take a long, hard look at what we do each and every day due to regulatory compliance requirements,” he said, noting that one study found “an estimated 78% of the things that patients and physicians identified as low-value work were within the full control of health care executives to change and weren't actually regulatory requirements.”’
The Federal Workforce Boom Under Biden
How much has excessive hiring in the federal workforce inflated nonfarm payrolls?
How much of this matched in the state and local government sector?
‘Since January 2021, the federal workforce has increased by about 120,800 employees. Washington has added as many workers in the last two years as during the prior 13. One reason is Veterans Affairs hospitals, which have staffed up to treat aging veterans. But employment has ballooned across nearly the entire government, as quarterly data from the Office of Personnel Management show.
‘Between December 2020 and March 2024 (the latest data), employment has increased sharply at the Environmental Protection Agency (9.4%), Agriculture Department (9.6%), Department of Housing and Urban Development (10.7%), Internal Revenue Service (14%), Energy Department (14.8%), State Department (18.4%) and Health and Human Services (18.7%).
‘Independent agencies have also mushroomed, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (9.8%), Securities and Exchange Commission (11.1%) and Federal Trade Commission (11.6%). Even the White House Council of Economic Advisers has increased by a third during the Biden Presidency, not that economic policy has improved. A rare Biden-era exception is Defense and the armed forces (-1.2%), despite an increasingly dangerous world.’
How Election Day impacts Trump’s deep state agenda and almost a century of government
Literature professor writes an essay arguing that the bureaucracy is meritocratic and apolitical.
Talk about fiction.
The most likely cuts under Schedule F will be in policy positions. You’re either on the same bus as the head of the executive branch or you are not.
‘But gutting regulatory agencies and replacing a meritocratic bureaucracy with MAGA loyalists won’t help small farmers or family-owned fishing boats. It will empower big corporations to pollute, exploit their workers, price-gouge customers, cut corners on safety – and to corrupt the political system.
‘It’s also illegal. Congress has deliberately protected those bureaucrats from the volatility of presidential politics.’
Company asks staff to return to office two days a week. Anyone who doesn’t want to do so can take an exit package.
Union that is trying to organize the workers say that their organizing efforts failed because so many people quit and took the money.
So, the NLRB is going after the company, a dating app for the LGBTQ community.
‘Say this for President Biden’s National Labor Relations Board—it’s an equal opportunity menace to employers. On Friday the board’s general counsel charged Grindr, the world’s largest LGBTQ dating app, with violating labor law by requiring workers to—gasp—show up at the office.
‘The Communications Workers of America (CWA) accused Grindr of union-busting by requiring workers last summer to come into the office all of two days a week. It’s usually easier for unions to organize workers in person. And the CWA alleges that the work-in-the-office mandate prompted 80 of the 120 employees it was trying to organize to quit.’