Op-ed: The Proposed AI Moratorium Will Harm People with Disabilities. Here’s How.
This op-ed – authored by CDT’s Ariana Aboulafia and Travis Hall – first appeared in Tech Policy Press on June 19, 2025. A portion of the text has been pasted below.
Among Congress’s chief duties is to pass a budget that appropriates funding for federal agencies. On May 22, the US House of Representatives passed a budget reconciliation package that would structure government operations for the 2026 fiscal year, sending it to the Senate. As many disability rights and justice advocates have said, many provisions in the bill would have devastating impacts on people with disabilities — particularly the $600 billion in cuts to Medicaid that could lead to over 10 million people losing their health coverage.
Buried deep in the bill is another provision that also has the potential to detrimentally impact disabled people: the proposed ten-year moratorium on the enforcement of state or local AI regulation. If enacted, it would prevent states and local governments from enforcing “any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems,” with limited exceptions.
The bill aims to prevent states from regulating emerging technologies that have genuine benefits, but that also are putting their constituents at risk in very real ways, including those with disabilities. Indeed, implementing AI tools in decision-making systems in high-stakes contexts like employment, education and healthcare presents a particularly high risk of harm for people with disabilities. These risks have been previously referred to as “tech-facilitated disability discrimination” — an umbrella term that encapsulates all of the ways that AI and other emerging technologies can cause people to experience discrimination on the basis of their disability. While existing disability rights statutes (like the Americans with Disabilities Act) do provide some means of legal recourse for this type of discrimination, state-level AI regulation remains a vital avenue for harm mitigation.