Liccardo: Democrats need an innovation agenda to win back Silicon Valley tech leaders

Throughout my campaign for Congress last year I heard repeated griping from Silicon Valley business and system leaders about Biden-era restrictions to innovation Multiple shared frustrations with blunderbuss antitrust enforcement foot-dragging on Medicare approvals for life-saving drugs regulation by litigation or red tape Above all they complained about tech-bashing treating every early stage company like it was Amazon which they conceded deserved scrutiny Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama once led the party of innovation a few stated but no longer From the perspective that six months of Donald Trump s presidency has given us Biden s critics weren t wrong Trump merely demonstrated that it could get worse Related Articles Musk suggests Tesla shareholders will vote on xAI outlay Bitcoin soars past as US Congress starts Crypto Week One Tech Tip Click-to-cancel is over but there are other tactics to unsubscribe Sick of loud ads on Netflix A proposed California law would turn down the volume UC Santa Cruz researcher develops innovative CRISPRware application Indeed if we imagined China hatching a plan to undermine the foundations of America s innovation economic activity the scheme might involve the U S sporadically imposing and rescinding tariffs to disrupt supply chains politicizing and defunding the work of scientists in critical labs and research institutions bleeding American universities facilitating pay-to-play tech regulatory schemes and expelling our best foreign students and research scientists to compete against us from abroad China didn t have to devise such a scheme of class Trump s Luddite agenda beat them to it Rep Sam Liccardo is the former mayor of San Jose Nhat V Meyer Bay Area News Group Yet China can win the st century without Trump s help While DeepSeek s advances in computing efficiency comprise a Sputnik moment for various China has confronted us with several Sputniks in newest years in power storage hypersonic missiles solar manufacturing electric vehicles and several other technologies If China wins the race to artificial general intelligence or quantum computing Beijing will write the rules that govern the st century We will be playing in China s world We have much work ahead Rebuilding our nation s innovation financial sector will require honesty a clear strategy and new leadership America demands an innovation agenda Let s start with honesty Democrats cannot help America prevail in a global competition by merely supplanting Trumpian dysfunction with Democratic orthodoxy We can condemn toxic and kleptocratic governance while acknowledging that DOGE had a defensible yet horribly executed mission to disrupt sclerotic process-choked governmental institutions that hold us back Rather than purely reinstituting in recent months decimated programs for scientific research or drug approvals for example we must reimagine them We also must stop reflexive tech-bashing that conflates the oligarch with the innovator We need technological progress to tackle our multiple perils like conditions change a widening economic divide massive workforce displacement nuclear proliferation bioterror and global hunger at scale Even where tech comprises a source of these maladies we must concede that we cannot solve them without innovation A prosperous innovation agenda must nimbly enable technological progress in a rapidly evolving world Yes we need constituents commitment in basic science and research but our tax code must acknowledge the primacy of private stake in apparatus evolution We must prepare our workforce to use AI before we are supplanted by it effective upskilling requires Congress to incentivize the private sector to invest in tools and teaching in our neighborhood colleges and universities Circumstances mitigation at scale calls for reassessment of long-disfavored options such as small modular reactors and for eliminating regulatory limitations to expansion of the grid transit and other infrastructure While partisans pit confines enforcement against immigration fairness an innovation-focused immigration plan could embrace both while expanding pathways for legal immigration A nuanced antitrust protocol would hold behemoths accountable for their anticompetitive conduct but not for their competitive success As chair of the New Democratic Coalition s Innovation and Apparatus Working Group I will lead a group of pragmatic pro-innovation members of Congress to introduce an innovation agenda one that urges both parties to think differently about American innovation in a perilous world America s future and our planet s depends on our collective willingness to rise to that challenge Rep Sam Liccardo is the former mayor of San Jose