A look at the White House’s pro-innovation artificial intelligence ‘action plan’

Earlier this year, the White House released an artificial intelligence (AI) “action plan,” declaring that, “Winning the AI race will usher in a new golden age of human flourishing.” The document’s central purpose is straightforward: to preserve American AI superiority. In practice, the plan mostly recommends consolidating and formalizing a long series of pro-innovation, anti-regulation executive orders the White House has issued since January 2025. Overall reactions from industry have been positive and reflect optimism over the administration’s commitment to free market innovation.

The plan is structured around three pillars: accelerating AI innovation, building American AI infrastructure, and leading in international AI diplomacy and security. The first pillar focuses on removing regulatory barriers and promoting private-sector development, including open-source AI and workforce training. The second pillar targets energy, permitting, and semiconductor supply chains, aiming to rapidly expand and secure the physical and technical infrastructure needed for large-scale AI deployment. The third pillar advances an assertive international strategy—promoting U.S. AI standards abroad, tightening export controls, and countering adversarial influence, especially from China.

The plan builds on the regulatory shift that began when President Donald Trump rescinded an AI-related executive order from President Joe Biden. Biden’s order focused on public support for regulations that reduced bias in AI products, while Trump’s first executive order on AI, issued in January, explicitly called for the removal of barriers related to AI development.

The action plan recommends tasking a broad set of agencies with carrying forward a deregulatory mandate. Each would be charged with reviewing, revising, or eliminating existing rules, adjusting grant-making, and accelerating approvals to align federal AI policy with the administration’s pro-innovation priorities, which aligns with Reason Foundation’s testimony on how to promote AI innovation.

For example, the plan recommends the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) “work with Federal agencies that have AI-related discretionary funding programs to ensure, consistent with applicable law, that they consider a state’s AI regulatory climate when making funding decisions and limit funding if the state’s AI regulatory regimes may hinder the effectiveness of that funding or award.”

Should the Trump administration ultimately grant agencies this broad discretion, the plan potentially hands them a tool to reward or penalize states on AI regulation at their own judgment. For instance, the National Science Foundation has a $100 million grant for AI research that it awards to various universities. It’s possible these kinds of large grants could be in jeopardy for states that, from the perspective of an agency, create burdensome regulations.

State legislatures and many Republican governors publicly opposed a congressional moratorium on state AI regulations, arguing that it would preempt state powers to enact laws, such as those that would criminalize deceptive AI-generated media intended to influence elections. This plan, instead, takes an agency-centric approach. Each state’s AI policy would be evaluated by federal bodies, whose leadership is closely tied to the Trump administration. Strategically, this is a more politically directed tool than the proposed moratorium by Congress, which would have undercut the authority of both Republicans and Democrats to control AI policy.

The plan includes a dedicated section on government AI adoption that recommends “all Federal agencies ensure—to the maximum extent practicable—that all employees whose work could benefit from access to frontier language models have access to, and appropriate training for, such tools.”

This directive could materially affect government efficiency and labor costs. For example, preliminary evidence from Pennsylvania’s early generative AI pilot, in which 175 state employees across 14 agencies used ChatGPT Enterprise for drafting, summarization, research, and IT support, reported an average of 95 minutes saved per day on these tasks. While still in the early stages, these results suggest that broad-based adoption and training in frontier language models may yield significant productivity improvements across federal operations and potentially lead to labor cost reductions for an administration willing to replace overhead with automation.

The action plan also coincides with an executive order aimed at streamlining federal permits for data centers. Large-scale storehouses of computers have become an essential component of artificial intelligence programs, both for building (“training”) the foundational models and for enabling models to interact with users. The administration has recognized that current regulations hamper new data centers, with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin noting on Fox News that the “EPA wants to increase certainty for owner-operators in the permitting process, making it clear what kind of permits are needed for new and modified projects.”

New data centers have often been met with local resistance, with citizens utilizing environmental protection rules at their disposal in an attempt to delay or block the creation of facilities that they argue reduce the quality of life or consume excessive resources. At the same time, federal and state energy agencies have identified the need for extensive additions to electricity infrastructure to meet this new demand; however, such infrastructure comes at a cost and requires time, tending to grow more slowly than demand. It is unclear how this new executive order will actually impact the construction of new data centers, but it demonstrates the administration’s willingness to explore ways to cut red tape and accelerate the permitting process.

Finally, the AI action plan recommends that several agencies promote and incentivize the use of publicly available data, including the creation of a new data “portal” for datasets from the National Science Foundation.

This plan marks a departure from a purely free market approach by calling for federal agencies to be empowered with broad discretion on politically sensitive issues—such as cutting government contracts with software that explicitly promotes progressive climate change reform. The result is a policy framework that both crystallizes the administration’s deregulatory agenda and provides agencies with explicit “air cover” to reward or penalize states based on both political criteria and compliance with federal AI priorities.

The White House’s AI action plan represents a clear policy direction favoring rapid innovation and reduced regulatory oversight. The plan’s effectiveness will depend heavily on how federal agencies interpret and implement their expanded discretion. However, it will give executive air cover to agency leaders who wish to create rules that are friendly to the expanding market of AI products.

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Source: https://reason.org/commentary/a-look-at-the-white-houses-pro-innovation-artificial-intelligence-action-plan/