The State of the Union is traditionally an opportunity for the President to gloat about the accomplishments of the past year, announce their legislative priorities, and of course announce that the state of the Union is good. The President is required to provide an update to Congress on the State of the Union per the constitution. It is important to remember that in our government framework the President only has to power to approve or reject, veto, legislation that has been approved by both the House of Representatives and Senate. This is a good time to consider the implications to technology that the President's proposed legislative agenda will have.
This year's State of the Union was organized three months after a momentous first year of legislating by a Democratic Senate, House of Representatives, and President Joe Biden. The President started his speech with an extended discussion on the Russian invasion of Ukraine which at the time was a new and pressing issue in America's political discourse. He also mentioned all the legislation in regards to fighting the Coronavirus pandemic.
Beyond the emergency aid provided at the beginning of his administration and the overall success of the vaccination effort, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill was the most consequential legislation that will have an impact on technology. President Biden declared that 1000s of bridges and highways will be repaired or replaced. He declared that the U.S. had started an infrastructure decade. The investments that are going to be made by the bipartisan infrastructure bill will be very important as most of the public infrastructure in the United States has been chronically underfunded with maintenance, repair, and replacement of infrastructure being delayed due to lack of budget.
President Biden then changed from the accomplishments of his administration to his priorities for the year. Immediately he discusses the importance of competing in the area of emerging technologies. To do this he encouraged Congress to pass the Bipartisan Innovation Act. He stated that the government used to spend 2% on research and development spending. He stated that Intel is investing $20 Billion in a chip fab 20 miles from Columbus Ohio. Additionally Ford's $11 Billion investment in electric vehicles that is creating 11,000 jobs.
The next major topic impacting technology that Biden discussed was efforts to counteract climate change. He didn't directly state this as the topic, but instead took a more tactful item by item declaration of interest in certain policies. He discussed increasing solar and wind power incentives. He brought up winterizing homes. This issue was framed as a way to reduce heating costs on working families. In the northeast many people heat their homes using heating oil which is expensive, but also a very high carbon emitting fuel. Winterizing homes to reduce heat losses will result in reducing the home heating bills of many Americans, but it also attacks climate change from a reduction of consumption point of view. It should also be pointed out that this policy if enacted would provide jobs to working class Americans in some of the construction trades. President Biden also proposed incentives for electric vehicle purchases. Electric vehicles provide an opportunity to separate the biggest transportation method from fossil fuel consumption. This policy will be important since currently the cost of electric vehicles is approaching the cost of regular gas and diesel powered cars. The incentives will help support the efforts by the main car producers to convert their vehicles to electric fleets. The net results of the proposed policies is to reduce America's consumption of fossil fuels that are the main source of human greenhouse gas emissions.
I intentionally skipped discussing the COVID-19 earlier as the reference at the beginning was to the fact that Congress could not meet last year for a State of the Union speech due to the high level of community spread last year. In this section of the speech he went about discussing the preparatory steps the government was taking to be prepared for an upswing in infections. He cited mask, anti-viral pills, and test stockpiling. The government taking a proactive role in stockpiling supplies in anticipation of a potential rise in the rates of infection is possibly the best practice that can come from the last two years of pandemic response. He also stated that the vaccine manufacturers can provide a new vaccine formulation that can protect against new variants in 100 days. The ability to generate a vaccine, an mRNA one, in such a quick time sounds fantastic. In many ways it is, but within the 100 days the utility of a vaccine against a new variant may be moot since one of the key factors for needing a new formulation is a variant with increased transmissibility. The vaccines built with omicron variant were due out this month. Unfortunately the rate of infection has already dropped significantly since the variant had already passed peak infection. This ability to get a vaccine for a new variant out to the population so quickly would be great if there is a significant increase in mortality from the new variant.
President Biden also proposed investing in new border technology to find drugs and human smuggling. This makes lots of sense since even though we have been in a pandemic which has reduced the amount of cross border traffic. The major border crossings of Tijuana-San Diego, Juarez-El Paso, and Nogales have significant volumes of traffic both individuals and commercial vehicles. The Tijuana-San Diego border crossing is the busiest in the Western Hemisphere and the 4th busiest in the World. As is quite obvious the large volumes of traffic make it impossible to stop, investigate, and inspect every car and not create a significant impact on the economy. Human smuggling and drug trafficking do impact society and the governments spending. My initial thoughts on the technology that Biden was referencing is continued non-destructive imaging technologies to perform inspections of vehicles without completely disassembly. This technology is very valuable for all the commercial traffic that crosses the border, both truck and rail car. The impact of additional imaging technology at official border crossings will be additional seizures of illegal immigrants and narcotics. The narcotics traffickers will always look for new routes and methods for moving their illegal products into the US. They could move to use more cross-border tunnels or use of small aircraft if those prove successful. The bigger impact from additional border crossing imaging technology will be human smuggling. More human smugglers will move to funnel illegal immigrants thru the wild dangerous paths across the desert southwest to the US border. This will inevitably result in more deaths of illegal immigrants. This may be a good topic for an individual blog post in the future.
The very last topic impacting technology that President Biden brought up is the need to regulate social media companies. Frances Haugen a former Facebook employee testified in Congress last year as a whistle blower about the dangers of social media platforms. Biden extolled on the risks of the natural experiment on children that the social media companies are performing. His proposed solutions are to ban advertising to kids and to stop collecting data on kids. Any discussion of regulating social media companies brings along with it the efforts to eliminate section 230 protections on these companies. Some politicians want to get rid of this protection as part of a vendetta against social media companies and their liberal bias. Another set of politicians want to remove this protection to fight child pornography and other material they deem obscene. I intend to create a post that discusses this topic in more depth in the near future. The end result of Biden's proposed regulations will be either the elimination of services to people under 18 and the repercussions to the remaining users who have been used to free services. I think that any initiative to regulate social media companies will avoid lobbying from these big businesses.
