Cruz Names Spectrum, AI Among Top Priorities When He Takes Senate Commerce Gavel

Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Ted Cruz, R-Texas, confirmed Friday that “one of my big priorities” once he becomes panel chairman in January will be a spectrum legislative package (see 2410290039). Cruz is expected to prioritize a new version of his 2024 Spectrum Pipeline Act (S-3909) instead of revisiting the Spectrum and National Security Act (S-4207) that current Commerce Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash, championed this year. S-3909 would require that NTIA identify at least 2,500 MHz of midband spectrum the federal government can reallocate within the next five years (see 2403110066). “Right now, there's an enormous amount of spectrum that the government owns and controls that they keep off the market,” Cruz said during a Friday podcast with conservative commentator Ben Ferguson. “I want to move it to the private sector” because it “ends up being a massive area of investment and expansion of jobs.” Cruz also expressed strong interest in AI legislation. “The Democrats want to regulate the hell out of” AI and “create essentially a European-style prior-approval system,” he said: “That's a terrible idea. It's an idea that is almost perfectly designed to ensure that America loses the battle for AI, and we fall behind the rest of the world.” Cruz wants “to maintain a very light-touch regulatory environment where innovation is driven from the private sector because I think AI” could be “the same sort of transformational technology that the development of the Internet was 25 years ago.”