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Experts warn of coming ‘reprioritization’ for cyber funding

Chris Teale — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:00:00 -0400

In the months since the House passed legislation to reauthorize the State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program in November and with companion legislation still pending in the Senate, some state and local leaders appear skeptical that it will be replenished and are looking for alternatives.

New funding for the program remains to be seen, as its initial $1 billion has been quickly exhausted by cash-strapped states looking to protect themselves from cyber threats.

Christine Serrano Glassner, chief of external affairs at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said the end of grant funding means states will have to engage in “reprioritization” of their cyber budgets and find new funding sources.

“We know that the funding is not going to be reupped on the state and local grant program at this point,” she said during a panel discussion at the Billington State and Local Cybersecurity Summit this week in Washington, D.C. “[States] know that they're never not asking for more help. It's got to be more about what resources are out there, what free resources and tools do they need to be aware of and start using. Reprioritization of their own budgets [for] what really matters.”

The $1 billion across four years has been spent on a variety of cyber efforts, including endpoint detection, multifactor authentication, security operations and other shared services. And a key tenet of the grant program, which was included in the 2021 infrastructure law, required states to have a cybersecurity planning committee and strategy in place.

But while lawmakers have voted to reauthorize the program, they have yet to fund additional years, although several groups have made various suggestions. A joint letter the Alliance for Digital Innovation, Better Identity Coalition, Cybersecurity Coalition, ITI and TechNet sent to lawmakers in September suggested establishing a stable funding stream of $4.5 billion over two years, noting that the “cost of inaction” would be even higher if Congress does not invest now in a national strategy.

However, in financially constrained times, it can be difficult for states to invest in cybersecurity when they have so many other priorities to fund.

“Are we going to support medical resources for families or feeding families? It's really tough to weigh that against cybersecurity or privacy infrastructure,” said Nevada Chief Information Officer Timothy Galluzi. “Obviously, having a crisis changes things a little bit, but it shouldn't take a crisis to motivate folks to invest in infrastructure and cybersecurity.”

It means, then, that cybersecurity professionals must be good at telling their stories and showing the difference their work makes. Too often, said Virginia Chief Information Security Officer Michael Watson, government cybersecurity leaders “get good” and then “get quiet” as their hard work has kept them out of the headlines. Then, they need to explain why continual investment is necessary, he said.

“If you're not telling your story, if you're not telling the story of cybersecurity and why it's important for your municipality, for your organization, they're not going to hear you,” Galluzi said. “They're not going to listen to you, and they're going to fund the other effort or the other priority.”

In addition, speakers said there need to be new ways to track metrics of success in cybersecurity that are more focused on outcomes. The old ways of tracking patches and the number of IT tickets that have been handled are “meaningless,” said Orange County, California CISO Andrew Alipanah. Instead, tracking how many critical assets are covered and to what extent, is much more effective.

“These are things that are meaningful and they have to follow directly from your strategic security plan,” Alipanah said. “It's one of the easiest ways to get funding, because you can actually show it to your policymakers and funding sources.”

These new approaches, and changing procurement to be more challenge- or outcome-focused, would be massive shifts in policy but would be more proactive, experts said. It would be a sea change compared to the past, when governments would only invest in cybersecurity after a major incident shut down their systems.

“Why don't you just fund the cybersecurity side of the house properly from the beginning, so that you don't have to jump through hoops and organize and reappropriate funds into an area that is obviously the forefront of all your data, all your infrastructure, all your people, all your [personally identifiable information] and all your [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act] data,” Jared Pane, senior director of public sector business for field engineering at data company Elastic, said in an interview at the summit. “Yet you're only going to throw a minimum amount of funding and a minimal amount of money towards that.”

Serrano Glassner, who herself was a local elected official in New Jersey — including a spell as mayor of Mendham Borough — until she resigned to take a post in the new Trump administration, said some tough choices are ahead in cybersecurity budgeting.

“We have to look within and say what is really important and what do we need to prioritize,” she said.

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South Dakota lawmakers reject mandatory E-Verify checks of worker citizenship, immigration status

Meghan O'Brien, South Dakota Searchlight — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by South Dakota Searchlight.

PIERRE — A bill that would have required some South Dakota employers to use a federal website to verify employees’ work eligibility failed in the state Senate on Wednesday, the second-to-last day of the annual legislative session.

E-Verify is a free website from the federal government that compares records from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Social Security Administration to the information on an employee’s I-9, an employment verification document that employers must file for all new employees, regardless of citizenship status.

In its final, amended form, House Bill 1209 would have required employers with more than 25 employees to check an employee’s documents with E-Verify within 10 days of their first day of work. The state’s Department of Labor requires employers to file new hire documents within 20 days.

Sen. Sue Peterson, R-Sioux Falls, said she contacted small-business owners in her district about the bill.

“They were already doing what they were required to do, and adding E-Verify to it didn’t add anything,” she said. “In fact, they were happy to do it as their patriotic duty.”

The bill said that if the state’s attorney general investigated a business and had reasonable cause to believe an employer committed a violation, the state could recover $2,000 in civil penalties per unauthorized or unverified employee.

Including E-Verify as another step in the hiring process could curb unauthorized immigration to the state, according to the bill’s supporters. But it also would put undue burdens on small-business owners, according to Sen. Randy Deibert, R-Spearfish.

“Yes, there’s a problem. Does this solve the problem? Absolutely not,” he said. “It increases my overhead, which means I’m charging each of you more for my services.”

The bill in its initial form succeeded in the House in February. Senators later amended it, as did a conference committee of members from each chamber.

The amended bill failed 15-18 on Wednesday in the Senate, and a subsequent attempt to revive the bill also failed.

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Businesses can’t require microchip implants for workers under new Washington law

Jake Goldstein-Street, Washington State Standard — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This story was originally published by the Washington State Standard.

Injected under the skin, usually between the thumb and index finger, microchip implants can serve as identification or make contactless payments smoother.

But Washington workers don’t need to worry about their employers forcing them to get “chipped”. Under House Bill 2303, signed Wednesday, companies can’t ask or require that.

The peculiar practice hasn’t been reported in Washington. Worldwide, as of 2024, more than 50,000 people have gotten the radio-frequency identification devices that are the size of a grain of rice, according to the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. Pet owners chip their pets to allow them to find their animals if lost.

Swedes were early adopters of the technology for people, with thousands electing to get chips instead of a key card for access to restricted workplace areas, among other uses.

A Wisconsin company offered the implants to workers in 2017, with dozens reportedly taking the opportunity. The company even hosted a so-called “chip party” for implantation of the $300 devices.

Microchipping brings privacy concerns, with some worried employers could track work performance with the chips.

“Microchipping could potentially be used as a means to control or monitor employee behavior,” Gov. Bob Ferguson said as he signed the legislation.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the use of microchips in humans in 2004 to allow health care professionals to easily find patient medical records. Some people with Alzheimer’s disease specifically have gotten chipped, for example.

At least a dozen states have passed laws similar to Washington’s.

Nevada may go the furthest, as the state prohibits workers from voluntarily getting chipped. Alabama may have the toughest punishment for violations, making it a felony.

Under Washington’s new law, employees can bring civil lawsuits for damages if their employer requires them to get a microchip.

The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Brianna Thomas, D-Seattle, passed the Senate unanimously and with strong bipartisan support in the House. Its prohibition takes effect in mid-June.

As Thomas and Ferguson smiled for a photograph after he signed the legislation, she celebrated with the bill’s motto: “Don’t chip me, bro.”

Washington State Standard is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Washington State Standard maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Bill Lucia for questions: info@washingtonstatestandard.com.

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Technology and smart development can guide America’s 2026 growth

Chris Giordano — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

With U.S. population growth continuing to concentrate in fast-growing metro areas and long-term forecasts projecting sustained demand for housing, infrastructure and redevelopment through 2050, the country is clearly heading into another year of strong population and economic momentum.

This momentum is overwhelmingly positive but only if cities are equipped with the tools, staff capacity, and modernized development management practices needed to process it effectively. Growth becomes an opportunity when we prepare for it, not when we struggle to keep up.

What we see consistently is that modernization is the key to unlocking responsible, sustainable growth. Digital permitting and electronic plan review help municipalities deliver faster responses while improving accuracy, transparency, and accountability.

Remote and video inspections reduce construction downtime and give both residents and contractors more flexibility and online systems that verify contractor licensing and insurance protect the public from the long-standing issue of unlicensed or underqualified actors — a challenge communities know all too well.

At the same time, 2026 will bring broader development trends that municipalities must prepare for. Expect a significant push to redevelop aging commercial corridors into mixed-use or residential spaces, especially as available land becomes more limited. Cities will also continue upgrading infrastructure to meet resilience standards and tightening coastal construction requirements.

These shifts will increase the complexity and volume of applications flowing into local building departments, making efficient, technology-enabled review processes more essential than ever.

Emerging tools like AI will support this work by helping architects and engineers submit cleaner plans from the start. While AI will not, and should not, replace the human judgment required for life-safety review, it can reduce code violations before they reach the city and help streamline the most repetitive aspects of the permitting workflow.

While communities are at different stages of their modernization journey, many are thoughtfully evaluating what comes next as demand, complexity, and expectations continue to rise.

Communities across the country are well positioned for this next chapter. By leaning into the successes resulting from outsourcing services and building on those relationships, our municipalities are already exploring new technologies, unified digital workflows, and customer-focused service models. By continuing to invest in modernization and collaborating closely with developers and residents, cities can turn rapid growth into long-term community strength.

America's growth isn’t slowing down; and with the right systems in place, our cities don’t have to either.

Chris Giordano is CEO of SAFEbuilt.

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Report: Data interoperability key to unlocking AI’s public health potential

Kaitlyn Levinson — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:47:35 -0400

Data interoperability is top of mind for public health leaders as they grapple with tightening budgets, changes in reimbursements rates, evolving policy mandates and persistent workforce shortages, according to a new report.

The drive to improve data services comes as agencies nationwide are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence as a tool in government operations to enhance efficiency and streamline workflows, according to a report released Tuesday by data platform company Snowflake. The findings are based on a survey of 183 health care decision-makers, including public health agency officials.

Indeed, 85% of respondents said data interoperability was a “higher or much higher priority” to their organization than in previous years, while 57% of respondents identified AI implementation as a reason for that, the report found.

“Interoperability is not a top industry priority simply because regulators have said it should be,” Shahran Haider, deputy chief data officer of NYC Health and Hospitals, said in the report. “It is the connective tissue that enables AI-driven value across the full spectrum of operational efficiency and clinical improvement opportunities, benefiting not just individual organizations, but our health care system and society as a whole.”

Data interoperability is the necessary infrastructure foundation to deploy AI tools that enable health care providers to more efficiently track and monitor health information across sectors and departments. The report says it can help identify outbreaks or population trends to inform public health responses. Such data coordination can help reduce duplicative testing efforts, lower overall spending and waste, and streamline administrative processes.

In fact, more than 70% of respondents said in the survey that improving patient experience and operational efficiency and decision-making also motivated their desire to improve data interoperability in health systems.

Many data systems at the state and local level are still siloed, however, which impedes public health agencies’ ability to manage and prevent public health threats, said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. Additionally, public health technologies across the U.S. are at various stages of maturity, with many agencies still relying on fax machines that may not be able to communicate with more advanced computer and data systems.

“If we had better data modernization and interoperability, we could do a much better job picking those cases up early and [leveraging] AI, because [the tech] can be very helpful to do tracking, forecasting and hypothesizing what to do to try to address public health threats,” said Benjamin.

Indeed, improving population health was one of respondents’ top drivers for improving data interoperability to ultimately adopt AI solutions, like agentic AI, according to the report. The technology, for instance, can assist with monitoring electronic health records, analyzing historical data or public health reporting capabilities.

Nearly half of respondents also cited AI’s potential for combating fraud, waste and abuse by, for example, enhancing the screening of billing, claims and prior authorizations. The report pointed to those efforts as a reason to prioritize data interoperability.

States must continue their efforts to facilitate data improvements to ensure public health systems can stay abreast of data and tech advancements, like AI-enabled health care, Benjamin said.

The California Department of Health Care Services, for example, has implemented a statewide data exchange framework since 2024 that aims to require health care entities in California to participate in a health data and information sharing network, under the state’s interoperability project.

“The real secret here is getting information in a timely way,” Benjamin said. “You can’t begin to talk about AI until you put those good data systems in.”

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Connecticut bill constraining use of license plate data gets broad support

Sara Bedigian and Emilia Otte, CT Mirror — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This article first appeared on CT Mirror and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Immigration advocates and others offered overwhelming support Monday for a bill that would restrict the use of data collected by automatic license plate readers, but representatives of law enforcement agencies said it could hurt their ability to solve crimes.

As written, House Bill 5449 would limit how long data is retained, and it would ban the use of data for immigration enforcement, investigating people who have sought or received abortions or transgender care, or finding the identity of someone “engaged in an activity protected under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

Concern about the use of license plate readers arose after reports surfaced that federal Border Patrol agents had been using data from the devices to conduct immigration enforcement throughout the interior U.S. The Connecticut chapter of the ACLU called for a temporary ban on the use of license plate readers throughout the state, raising particular concerns about police departments that contracted with the company Flock safety.

In February, CT Insider published an investigation that found that license plate readers in at least six police departments in Connecticut that use Flock had been searched by out-of-state agencies for reasons related to immigration enforcement.

During the public hearing on Monday, Connecticut residents, as well as some Republican lawmakers, expressed discomfort with the idea that license plate readers could be used to track their vehicles and the vehicles of others.

Rep. Doug Dubitsky, R-Chaplin, questioned the widespread collection of data “for no reason whatsoever” on people when there was no reason to suspect any wrongdoing.

But Groton Police Chief L.J. Fusaro disagreed with Dubitsky’s characterization. He said that police officers only look at the data if they are trying to find out information about a crime that has been committed. He said that in his town, they’d used the license plate readers to locate a woman with dementia.

“Your concerns are that we will have police officers tracking people continuously for virtually no reason at all, and it just isn't the case,” Fusaro said. “These tools [are] used by police officers in the conduct of their duties to make their community safer, to investigate crimes and violations. And, quite frankly, they've been pretty effective.”

Paul Melanson, director of public safety in the town of Farmington, said there needed to be a balance between protecting privacy and being able to use the license plate readers to locate missing persons and identify vehicles that are connected to a crime.

The bill prohibits law enforcement agencies from keeping data collected on the license plate readers for more than seven days unless it is part of a court proceeding or is being used to collect fines from speeding or red-light cameras.

“The longer the data is stored, the greater the risk of misuse, unauthorized access or data breaches,” said Gus Marks-Hamiltion, campaign and organizing manager of ACLU-CT. “Limiting retention helps ensure that the technology can serve legitimate public safety purposes without creating long-term record of people's movements.”

But Melanson said that the proposed seven-day data retention period in the bill does not give them enough time to investigate and solve crimes. He gave the example of cases of financial fraud against the elderly, saying that it often takes time before someone will confess to having given money to someone, or to even realize that they’ve been a victim of financial fraud.

Melanson proposed a 30-day retention limit, which would line up with a recent policy adopted by the Police Standards and Training Council. Even with that, Melanson said, police chiefs had pushed back, giving examples of crimes that they wouldn’t be able to solve without access to data that went further back in time.

Rep. Greg Howard, R-Stonington, said that other restrictions in the bill barring the use of data for immigration enforcement meant that it didn’t make a difference how long the data was retained.

“ Sex offenses, burglaries, when people are on vacation — there's a litany of reasons where crimes are delayed in the reporting, the police are delayed in understanding what's happened,” Howard said. “When it comes to ICE, the Trust Act and immigration, the retention data doesn't make a difference because you can't share it no matter how long you've had it.”

The bill also forbids police departments from sharing data with any network that doesn’t follow the same prohibitions and confines data sharing to Connecticut agencies and agencies in New York, Rhode Island or Massachusetts that agree to abide by the same restrictions.

But police chiefs protested the limits in the bill toward data sharing with other law enforcement agencies, saying that this represents a key component of why these readers are so valuable.

Melanson gave the example of a young man who left Connecticut in his parents’ car and drove to a state in the Midwest. The police were able to track his movements across states and locate him using data from license plate readers across the country.

“ I think we had four or five hits between us and the Midwest. That was the strength of this — was being able to identify what state, so that his parents could say, ‘Wait a second. I know somebody he was corresponding with, and we were able to get that individual the help he needed,” he explained.

The proposed bill also states that police departments cannot contract with a vendor unless the contract includes a policy confirming that the vendor will follow the same prohibitions on data sharing.

Melanson said the POST policy contains similar restrictions, requiring vendors and law enforcement agencies to adhere to Connecticut law regarding the sharing of information with federal immigration enforcement agencies. Fusaro said the police had been assured by Flock that their data would not be shared with federal immigration officials.

But Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, questioned the effectiveness of those policies. He said that as long as the data was accessible, other agencies could take that data and give it to federal immigration authorities.

“I'm not just here to disagree with you, but I think we have to be very clear about what the potential is here and very clear about the fears that some folks have,” Winfield said. “Whether you mean to or not, participating in this in the way that we have has caused some people to look at it and say … that they feel that there’s a real issue of liberty and freedom here.”

Kevin Kane, director of government affairs for Flock Safety, told lawmakers that Flock does not automatically share municipalities' data. They have to opt-in to be part of a network.

“I want to be clear that all data is owned by our customers, and our technology empowers communities to have control over how their data is used, and if they choose to opt in to sharing data with any other law enforcement agency,” Kane said in testimony.

According to Kane, if a state has a law preventing its data from being searched for specific reasons, like immigration enforcement, that prohibition will be encoded in the system, and agencies that access it will have to attest that they are not using the data for that purpose. If an agency then decides to search a network for the purpose of immigration enforcement, the data from the cameras from that state will be pulled out of the search.

Melanson said that, because of the POST policy, Flock now has a warning posted on its front page alerting users that data from Connecticut could not be used for certain purposes.

Kane said the company already requires law enforcement agencies to give “specific justification” for every data search they make and has additional “protections” around any searches related to immigration or “reproductive care.” He said all the data is encrypted and stored in the cloud for 30 days, after which it is automatically deleted. Additionally, he said, agencies are able to see who searched their data and for what purpose the data was searched.

Liz Gustafson, the Connecticut director of Reproductive Equity Now, testified to the committee that she was concerned that out-of-state law enforcement could bypass Connecticut laws preventing surveillance around abortions by listing generic terms like “investigation” as the reason for the search. She cited a case in Texas in which law enforcement used data from Flock license plate readers to track a woman who left Texas to have an abortion.

“We hear from patients and providers who are afraid, not just of laws in their home state but of being watched, of being tracked or potentially criminalized simply for seeking or providing health care,” Gustafson said.

Flock later called the reporting “unequivocally false,” saying that the sheriff’s office in Texas had done the search because the woman was missing and the family was worried, not because she was under a criminal investigation for having had an abortion. Kane, in his testimony, reiterated this, and said he was not aware of any other cases in which agencies had used Flock data to do investigations on someone seeking an abortion.

Howard, a police officer, praised the company for the way that the technology has helped with police work.

“Your technology has been used in my district to solve crimes and, equally as important, to exonerate innocent people,” he said.

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Federal government taps Utah to test new electric flight technologies

Alixel Cabrera, Utah News Dispatch — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This story was originally published by Utah News Dispatch.

Utah is among eight states the federal government has selected to test the future of electric aircraft and other aviation technologies, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced on Monday.

The state is poised to be part of a three-year pilot program on Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing (eVTOL), meant to safely integrate highly automated aircraft into the national airspace with planes that use electric propulsion and can take off and land vertically, according to the Utah Department of Transportation.

The state will lead a partnership with Oregon, Idaho, Arizona and Oklahoma, along with industry leaders “to test new aviation technologies and gather data.”

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“This partnership puts Utah at the forefront of the next generation of aviation technology while creating new opportunities for economic growth, research and workforce development across our state,” Gov. Spencer Cox said in a statement.

The program is part of an executive order President Donald Trump signed last year “unleashing American drone dominance,” which mandated his cabinet to accelerate technologies like eVTOL aircraft since they “promise to modernize methods for cargo delivery, passenger transport, and other advanced air mobility capabilities.”

“Congratulations to the great American innovators behind each of these exciting pilot programs,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a news release. “Working together, we will ensure America leads the way in safely leveraging next-gen aircraft to radically redefine personal travel, regional transportation, cargo logistics, emergency medicine, and so much more.”

The president’s vision for air traffic modernization may include advancements in short-range air taxis, and lower-cost emergency-management response.

The eVTOL testing will take place in different environments across the West, including urban and rural areas, mountainous terrain and wildfire-prone regions, UDOT said in a news release. But that’s not an entirely untapped market for Utah. The state has already tested advanced aviation technologies, operating mobile command centers “that allow crews to connect aircraft systems, monitor live video and flight data, and coordinate testing operations from the field.”

“The project could also support future transportation planning as Utah prepares to host the 2034 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, where emerging aviation technologies could assist with logistics, emergency response and regional mobility,” the department said in the release.

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Utah News Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Utah News Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor McKenzie Romero for questions: info@utahnewsdispatch.com.

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Feds pledge beefed up information-sharing amid new cyber strategy

Chris Teale — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Federal cybersecurity officials pledged to work more with states and localities on information-sharing, protecting critical infrastructure and workforce development, days after the release of a major cyber strategy.

White House National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said during the Billington State and Local Cybersecurity Summit in Washington, D.C. this week that President Donald Trump’s administration wants an information-sharing framework with state and local government and the private sector that “moves at speed and is actionable.”

His statements come hot on the heels of the Trump administration releasing its National Cyber Strategy on Friday.

And while Cairncross said that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, FBI and Department of Justice already do a “tremendous job in responding and assisting with that response,” more work lies ahead.

“We're looking for ways to streamline information sharing from the [U.S. government] side,” Cairncross said. “Often how we know things is super sensitive. What we know is less so. We want to figure out how to communicate that in a helpful, actionable way, as we work through that on the interagency side, with partners on the state and local side.”

Cairncross said the federal government will soon begin a pilot program with law enforcement agencies to explore how to better share information.

And an executive order Trump signed in addition to releasing the cyber strategy urges the Secretary of Homeland Security and CISA director to work with the National Cybersecurity Center to “provide training, technical assistance, and resilience building” to state, local, Tribal and territorial governments, “including to expand defensive capacity, share threat intelligence, and harden SLTT partners’ critical infrastructure systems against cybercrime exploitation by [Transnational Criminal Organizations].”

The announcement comes months after federal funding expired for the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, and the organization began its new life with a paid membership model. Carlos Kizzee, senior vice president for stakeholder engagement at the nonprofit Center for Internet Security, which houses the MS-ISAC, said last month that more than 3,000 organizations have signed up and 24 states are members in some form.

But the Trump administration said there is more to come in intergovernmental cooperation. The National Cyber Strategy pledges to “galvanize the role” of state, local, Tribal and territorial governments “as a complement to — not a substitute for — our national cybersecurity efforts.”

“To be honest, as we look towards the last administration and how they approached the Office of the National Cyber Director, they really lost sight of the opportunity of being able to work with our SLTT partners and truly the amazing people, leadership and experiences that come from the state and local level within cyber, and part of that is thinking about the broader context of expertise that comes from the state and local level,” said Monroe Molesky, director for state affairs at the White House Office of the National Cyber Director.

Critical infrastructure is one area where the federal government is looking to reset its relationship with states and localities, officials said on stage. Cairncross said when water, power, pipelines, telecoms and the like faced cyberattacks, the federal government used to come in afterwards as an auditor to tell system operators where they fell short. That must change, he said.

“This is not a regulatory compliance exercise,” Cairncross said. “If you were whacked by a foreign adversary, the United States government should not turn around and hand you a compliance list and say it's your fault because you didn't do these things. You should be working together, because it's the job of the [U.S. government] to defend the country from foreign adversaries and transnational criminal organizations.”

The pledge comes as hostilities in Iran have some experts worried about hacktivists linked to the country retaliating by attacking critical infrastructure on these shores, as they have elsewhere in the Middle East. Better securing systems and harmonizing regulations should be the federal government’s focus, speakers said, as well as hacking back themselves.

“We want to make sure that, on your worst day when you're dealing with a cyber incident, that you're thinking about how to keep critical systems online, how to ensure that vital services are flowing to the people that need them most,” said Seth McKinnis, deputy assistant national cyber director for critical infrastructure at the White House Office of the National Cyber Director.

Workforce development will also be crucial, speakers said, as governments at all levels confront vacancies in the public sector and a need to get people in place. Cairncross promised a cyber academy at the federal level that he said will build a “patriotic cyber force,” and find ways for some jobs in cyber to not require a four-year degree.

Similar work will be done at the state level, said Brandon Dues, ONCD’s deputy assistant national cyber director for cyber workforce, including working with states to “scale up those best practices” on workforce development and replicate them elsewhere and removing duplicative efforts.

“The federal government can’t and should not do this alone,” Dues said.

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Report: States are taking a cautious approach to agentic AI

Kaitlyn Levinson — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:27:30 -0400

Just a couple years after generative artificial intelligence became popular for public use, states are already dipping their toes into the next STAGE of the technology: agentic AI. But a new report suggests that tech leaders are taking a cautious approach to the budding technology.

Agentic AI refers to advanced large language models that “can actually start doing the work for us,” said Amy Glasscock, program director for innovation and emerging issues at the National Association of State Chief Information Officers.

Unlike generative AI, for example, where the technology is creating content, like summaries of policies or translations, agentic AI can facilitate “decision making, planning and executing steps without human intervention [and] doing a lot more things automatically,” she explained.

As government agencies constantly strive to do more work with fewer resources, agentic AI has piqued the interest of many state lech leaders as a force multiplier and to address ongoing workforce shortages, according to a report released last week by NASCIO. But state chief information officers are recognizing that the transition to leveraging more agentic AI tools will be gradual, particularly as the technology poses greater security and privacy risks than its predecessors.

“Like with any AI, we always recommend starting small with pilot projects [or] doing things internally before using it externally on citizen services … before it’s scaled and could cause widespread problems,” Glasscock said.

In Virginia, for example, former Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order in July to launch the nation’s first agentic AI pilot program aimed at improving agencies’ efficiency, and ultimately, residents’ experience with government services, the report stated. The same month, Delaware lawmakers launched an AI sandbox initiative to offer startups and industry leaders a controlled environment to develop tech solutions, like agentic AI, before they are deployed in real-world situations.

A gradual expansion into agentic AI capabilities also gives states the opportunity to more effectively address the tech’s security risks, as an AI agent’s task “might include accessing sensitive data, misusing trusted systems or escalating privileges, and before a human realizes it, the damage is done,” the report stated.

Glasscock pointed to Tennessee’s Department of Finance and Administration, which released a request for information late last year for a modernized enterprise resource planning system as the state’s current ERP is set to expire in 2035. The RFI includes inquiries about how generative AI could influence the technology, including how agentic capabilities could be leveraged for the ERP’s purpose and its potential impacts.

Tennessee officials, for instance, are seeking more information on how AI-enabled ERP platforms can operate in compliance with government security and privacy requirements, how such technology is designed to ensure client data security and confidentiality and how other security controls are being leveraged, like encryption or zero-trust principles.

States can implement security mitigation efforts, such as monitoring and logging records of the agentic AI’s actions to track any unexpected behaviors over time. The report also suggests establishing limits on how often or how long AI agents can be used with automatic throttling or system shutdowns, based on recommendations from OWASP, a nonprofit dedicated to software security.

Another way agencies can mitigate security threats is to give AI agents “minimum permissions” for the tools and tasks they are completing, which might include read-only access or specific APIs, according to the report. States should also require human oversight and approval to guide AI agent actions, particularly for “destructive or sensitive actions like deleting data, transferring funds or publishing content.”

The report also identifies five phases that a state may experience as they continue to explore and implement AI solutions. Those phases include characteristics of AI tools currently in use that indicate where states are in maturing systems from generative to agentic AI.

The five phases can help tech leaders “think about the possibilities, especially when it comes to citizen services, how agentic AI might be super helpful,” Glasscock said. For example, a tech leader can take inspiration on how to leverage agentic AI to assist with benefits applications like reviewing and approving an application automatically to yield a “quicker turnaround time,” she said.

The first phase entails the use of AI to complete tasks, such as writing computer code and answering employee or citizen questions, while human users remain the “primary doers and decision makers,” according to the report. The second phase of agentic AI refers to the tech’s ability to remember context within a task, like a chatbot that can output content based on previous inquiries during a user’s session.

A third phase of agentic AI refers to the technology being able to take some form of action independently, which is “the subtle tipping point into agentic AI,” the report stated. For agencies deploying AI solutions, the third phase could look like an AI tool that prefills a form using collected data or automatically routs a document for approval.

More advanced uses of agentic AI are likely to fall in the fourth phase, which is described as the AI agent being able to manage a task “across time, steps and systems,” like processing a new employee’s onboarding procedures or managing an application from intake to a final decision, according to the report.

The fifth phase, which Glasscock said nobody has fully entered yet, advances the technology to where an AI agent initiates work without being prompted. This phase could include, for example, a tool that conducts outreach to citizens when an action is needed to complete an application or flagging policy changes before a compliance deadline.

While states are far from adopting and implementing agentic AI regularly, tech leaders are starting to consider where they are in their AI journeys now to lay the groundwork for its eventual rollout, Glasscock said.

Indeed, states “are moving in this direction,” particularly as agentic AI holds promise to offer governments the ability to give residents a “smoother experience [to get] their questions answered more quickly and their needs met more quickly,” she said.

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Tennessee uses ‘one stop shop’ portal for benefits programs

Chris Teale — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:00:00 -0400

The Tennessee Department of Human Services used to have around 20 separate phone numbers for its various divisions, while each of the state’s 95 counties also had a phone number residents could call for help with benefits programs.

It made enrolling, checking eligibility or otherwise getting help very “fragmented,” as well as inconsistent, said Pamela Fusting, TNDHS’ director of operations for customer experience. But in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the state sped up its modernization journey and in 2022 launched a customer portal she said is designed to be a “one-stop shop” for benefits in the state.

Now, residents can apply for more than one assistance program on one application, track those applications on a central dashboard and keep track of any appeals and hearings associated with them on another dashboard. Meanwhile, those dozens of phone numbers have been consolidated into one, while call takers can use generative artificial intelligence to summarize calls so they can focus on listening, rather than taking notes. The telephony system is integrated with the state’s eligibility platform to ensure a unified approach, while a chatbot is also available to answer questions.

“I'm so grateful that we are able to really attack processes and business outcomes from a customer's perspective,” Fusting said in an interview last week during the ServiceNow Government Forum in Washington, D.C. “Doing what we're doing is really putting the power in the hands of the customer to get the information and access to the services that they need when they need them in a timely fashion, and through a tool that allows them to do it outside of business hours if necessary. It really puts the power in the hands of the customer.”

The uptake has been tremendous already. Since launching in 2022, the portal has had 1.6 million customer accounts registered and adds 20,000 new accounts each month, Fusting said, with around 300,000 logins each month. And on the employee side, the time it takes to wrap up a call and analyze the information contained in it has been cut by 55%, while about 90 seconds per call is saved as call-takers are not having to furiously take as many notes.

Residents can also verify their identities through the portal, which saves time. And, of the requests that are received by the AI-driven chatbot, 81% are handled there and then, with far fewer callers choosing to escalate to a live chat with a human agent. The use of AI, especially for summarizing calls and moving those service requests forward, has been a game changer since it launched last October, Fusting said.

“Just having the opportunity to use generative AI to give our staff an opportunity to pause on typing while they're talking to a customer and allow that call to be auto summarized for them, has really improved the quality of the interaction for our customers,” she said. “At the same time, it's ensured that the call output, the note that's generated and then documented, is consistent across the board. We know it's going to capture the information we want it to capture, and it always gives the human an opportunity to edit it where needed and confirm that it's accurate, but still, it provides it in a format that's consistent across the board.”

Numerous state agencies have turned to AI, including those in New Mexico and Maryland. It’s all part of a wider push towards a so-called “no wrong door” approach, where government services can be accessed from anywhere and do not require applicants to know the intricacies of which agency or division they need to communicate with.

Having the foundation in place from the COVID-19 pandemic, when TNDHS quickly stood up a portal to help residents access various relief programs, has established the agency in good stead as part of its modernization journey, Fusting said. And while there is more work to do, she said, knowing what is possible can help to get more divisions and employees on board.

“It was really a selling point,” Fusting said of the COVID-19 relief portal. “Folks realized the value of doing this and really kept marching toward making that something that was agency wide.”

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New York lawmaker wants moratorium on sale of AI chatbot-enabled kids’ toys

Annie McDonough and Rebecca C. Lewis — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0400

Not in my Barbie.

State Sen. Andrew Gounardes is drafting legislation that would ban the sale of artificial intelligence-enabled toys for kids – a real thing that currently exists, despite the southern Brooklyn legislator likening it to an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

“I have three little kids. There is no way in hell I think a teddy bear or Barbie doll should have a chatbot in it,” Gounardes said Sunday, speaking at a Met Council event on AI. A spokesperson for Gounardes said they are still finalizing details of the legislation and could not share draft text ahead of publication, but Gounardes said Sunday that the bill would “put a moratorium on the sale of those toys once they come to market.”

Gounardes told City & State he is not yet sure who would co-sponsor the bill in the Assembly. It’s also unclear whether Gov. Kathy Hochul would support the bill.

“Governor Hochul has implemented nation-leading regulations to ensure safe and responsible AI use in New York State,” a spokesperson for Hochul said in a statement, adding that she “remains committed to keeping kids safe online” and would review any bill that passes both houses of the state Legislature.

AI-enabled toys – for example, a teddy bear capable of conversing with kids via WiFi, a microphone and a large language model – are booming in China and have also been growing in popularity in the United States. Major AI companies have not released toys themselves but have still come under scrutiny for the advertised use of their chatbots in kids’ toys. A report by the consumer advocacy organization Public Interest Research Group found that despite major companies’ attempts to ban kids from using their chatbots, a third-party developer could use their large language models to build AI-enabled toys made for kids.

Julie Samuels, executive director of the industry group Tech:NYC, suggested the state should first focus on data privacy. “Protecting kids online is critical. We should start by passing comprehensive data privacy legislation, creating a consistent foundation of rules for how our data is used – rules that New York currently lacks,” she said in a statement. “That way, more targeted proposals around things like games and toys can build on clear protections for families.”

Gounardes and Assembly Member Alex Bores – who joined him at the Met Council event on Sunday – together sponsored the RAISE Act, which includes some of the nation’s strongest regulations on major AI developers. Hochul signed a watered down version of the bill late last year.

Both legislators are in favor of additional regulations on AI – Bores, a computer scientist by trade, has made it a cornerstone of his bid for a congressional seat in Manhattan, attracting the ire and massive capital of an industry-backed PAC spending against him. But neither legislator is an AI doomer or Luddite: Both said Sunday that they use AI in their daily lives, and are concerned with educating kids on the technology and preparing New York’s workforce for AI-related job loss. “We’re absolutely late to the dance,” Bores said of technology education in schools.

Legislators don’t appear to have any plans to slow their pace on AI regulations this year. State Sen. Kristen Gonzalez, chair of her chamber’s Internet and Technology Committee, kicked off the new legislative session with a hearing to examine best practices for ensuring the safe use of artificial intelligence across industries as the technology continues its rapid expansion into nearly every facet of life.

One bill from Gonzalez, first introduced nearly a year ago, inexplicably drew the attention of the crypto-based prediction market Polymarket last week. The company’s X account declared that proposed legislation in New York would ban chatbots from “answering questions related to several licensed professions like medicine, law, dentistry, nursing, psychology, social work, engineering, and more.” The post has received over 12 millions views and sparked significant backlash.

It also prompted a response from Gonzalez, whose bill would not explicitly ban chatbots from answering questions related to those fields, but would instead create criminal penalties for companies if their AI impersonates a licensed professional while offering advice. “You should have the right to seek damages if a chatbot tells you it is a doctor, a lawyer, a veterinarian, or any other licensed professional and gives you bad advice,” she said in a statement a day after the Polymarket post.

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Lawmakers consider bill that would keep private keys private in Rhode Island

Alexander Castro, Rhode Island Current — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.

For the third consecutive year, Rhode Island lawmakers are considering a bill that would draw firmer boundaries around one of the most sensitive pieces of digital life: private keys.

Private keys are a type of credential used in cryptography to protect digital communications, identities, accounts, and assets like bitcoin wallets or other cryptocurrency holdings. Bill H7957, led by Woonsocket Democratic Rep. Stephen Casey, would preclude courts and government agencies from forcing someone to hand over a private key tied to these digital properties.

“It’s more like your private property,” Casey said in a phone interview Monday about what the bill seeks to protect. “Somebody confiscates your cell phone and you have all your digital assets on there. They shouldn’t have access to that without really due process.”

Under the proposal, courts and government agencies could still subpoena or otherwise seek information about or seize a digital asset. But these entities would be limited in what they could ask for or control if the asset can be accessed via a private key. That’s because private keys can unlock access to more information or data than is needed or relevant for a specific investigation. Often, a matching “public” key used to access the same asset may supply the desired information.

The bill went before the House Committee on Innovation, Internet and Technology at its first meeting of the year on Thursday evening, March 5. Like last year’s hearing on the same legislation, the House tech committee received a refresher course on how private keys work.

Andrew Begin — a cryptocurrency activist and organizer with RI Bitcoiners —came to testify for the second year on the legislation. Begin likened a private key to a key for a safe.

“It would be weird to give somebody else your key to that,” Begin said.

In public-key cryptography, private keys are matched with public keys. The shareable public keys can be used to send or receive assets or messages, while private keys that are closely held by their owners often give access to entire accounts or stores of information, rather than just single transactions.

Begin gave two-factor authentication — known to most people as the codes sent to your phone or email when logging into an account — as another example of “some things we keep secret.”

“With bitcoin and digital assets, those are like a safe,” Begin said. “Your private key is just 12 words or 24 words, and you write them down, and you don’t take a picture of them, you don’t say them out loud if you’re talking to Alexa, you don’t save them in Google Drive. Because once a private key is exposed to one person, you can consider it exposed to the entire world, and then the assets will be gone.”

Lone bill sponsor Casey likened private keys to Social Security numbers. The bill is essentially privacy legislation, he said, it’s one of several crypto-related bills he’s submitted in recent years. Casey said he’s not a crypto investor himself, but after meeting with crypto activists in recent years, he sees their efforts as possibly helping Rhode Island’s economy “move into a digital age.”

“Everybody else has somebody who’s pulling for them,” Casey said. “So I’ve submitted the legislation over the last few years, and I’m still learning more about it.”

Begin characterized the legislation as not just protective but also educational. It’s a way to send “a strong message that the state respects your property, and the state will go through appropriate processes regarding transactions and assets,” Begin said.

Modeled After Wyoming Legislation

Another bill by Casey that would establish a special legislative commission to study blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies was also heard last Thursday. Casey’s bills have usually been mirrored on the Senate side by Sen. Lou DiPalma, a Middletown Democrat and Raytheon engineer.

Joining Begin in support for both of Casey’s bills was Dan Hersey, founder of the Rhode Island Bitcoin Policy Initiative, whose website notes it has helped draft the crypto-related bills that appear at the Rhode Island State House. He noted that DiPalma’s bill to create a blockchain commission passed the Senate floor last year. “It never received a vote in the House,” he said.

Hersey testified that taking crypto seriously was one way Rhode Island could work toward benefitting “from blockchain and the cryptocurrency economy while protecting consumers. He also testified in support of the private key bill.

“Compelling someone to hand over a private key in a proceeding about a single transaction is akin to demanding the deed to someone’s house when the court only needs their mailing address,” Hersey said.

Hersey called the private key bill “a proactive measure” that still allows courts and agencies access to information they need about digital assets.

“There’s no doubt they should be able to get that, but they should not be forced to demand the private key itself,” Hersey said. “And that’s where this bill draws the line.”

Hersey said the Rhode Island legislation is modeled closely after a similar bill passed by Wyoming’s legislature in 2023. Like that law, the Rhode Island proposal would suppress official demands for a private key “unless a public key is unavailable or unable to disclose the requisite information,” the bill reads.

“It’s not an absolute shield, but is more so a sensible default,” Hersey said.

Compelling someone to hand over a private key in a proceeding about a single transaction is akin to demanding the deed to someone's house when the court only needs their mailing address.
– Dan Hersey, founder of the Rhode Island Bitcoin Policy Initiative

Randall Rose, a former software engineer, testified in support of the bill but shared his “slight criticism” of its wording. The bill, he said, never defines what a “public key” is, which Rose argued could confuse legal interpretations and create the very outcomes the bill wants to prevent. Courts and officials, Rose thought, may rely on the typical meaning of “public” rather than its specific cryptographic definition.

“Sometimes you want only one person to have a private key, and 20 people to have a public key,” Rose said, “Then the quote/unquote ‘public key’ is not really public in a legal sense.”

Rose argued the bill is really about aligning subpoenas and investigations more closely with modern encryption systems, which rely on private and public keys for much more than cryptocurrency.

“When police agencies are doing a search or somebody’s executing a subpoena or doing discovery, they tend to just grab all the information indiscriminately,” Rose said. “And that’s just not in tune with how modern technology works.”

The bill, he added, “doesn’t really get in the way of anything worthwhile happening” when it comes to investigation. Instead, it draws a line at the public key, “if that’s enough to get the information you need.”

A Senate duplicate of Casey’s bill — once again sponsored by DiPalma — was submitted in late January but has not yet been scheduled for a hearing.

As is standard practice for bills upon introduction in a committee, Casey’s legislation was held for further study Thursday.

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Rhode Island Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Rhode Island Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janine L. Weisman for questions: info@rhodeislandcurrent.com.

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Raleigh embraces AI to meet residents’ expectations

Chris Teale — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:00:00 -0400

With a growing, and young, population in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, its residents and elected officials expect Raleigh to be innovative and embrace new technology, including artificial intelligence, according to its chief information officer.

And the city has embraced the technology in ways to help make its residents’ lives easier and help its employees do their jobs better. It started at its busy intersections, where an initial partnership to simply count cars in a more technologically advanced way than manual counters has blossomed into an effort to track traffic patterns and analyze video to understand the causes of accidents and near misses.

And Raleigh’s staff can access an AI-driven service desk to file tickets and receive assistance, with the upgraded chatbot trained on content and information from the city’s knowledge base. With only 2% of service requests requiring human intervention, the city estimates it has saved $315,000 on IT service desk costs by redirecting its employees to other tasks, and has sped up employee onboarding by 66%. Case resolution now takes around a minute less per ticket, meaning one month of work has been saved in many tasks.

“To me, there's this expectation that, because we're in the Research Triangle and because we have such an innovative and young workforce, they expect the same services from their city government,” Raleigh CIO Mark Wittenburg said in an interview at the ServiceNow Government Forum in Washington, D.C. last week. “I liken it to almost what Uber did to the taxi industry: they're looking for us to do the same thing for government services, make those government services easier to get to quicker and resolve their issue.”

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, however, and the initiative has needed some refinement. Wittenburg recalled during a panel discussion at the event that, at one stage, the AI-backed chatbot told a user having printer issues to “change the registry,” which is something he said he would only prefer trained IT staff to do.

That instruction from the chatbot showed the agent had “too much information,” Wittenburg said, but after tweaking the city articles it had access to and adding similar content from Microsoft’s knowledge base, things were on a more even keel.

Imperfect data might be a concern for some more risk-averse state and local leaders as they experiment with and roll out AI, especially for public use. But Wittenburg said local leaders must be willing to try, pivot quickly when there are issues and otherwise make sure AI cites its sources for full transparency.

“Your data is never going to be perfect,” he said during the panel discussion. “It’s got to be good enough, and then adjust, adjust quickly, and then use this as an opportunity to correct your data, enhancing reliability and the data source transparency.”

Observers echoed that sentiment and said state and local leaders must be willing to iterate, rather than assume the technology is infallible and will never need tweaking. Slowly ramping up the use of AI can also help build confidence.

“What I tell our customers is, don't turn AI on and step back and say it's going to be perfect,” Chris Dilley, ServiceNow’s chief technology officer for state and local government, said in an interview. “Make sure you're trusting, make sure you're validating, make sure you're looking at it, until you can get to the point of really trusting what you have…I tell our customers, turn that dial down, to not trust it. And then, as you build more confidence in these processes, get hundreds, if not thousands, of things running through there, then you could turn that dial to trust it a little bit more and maybe turn it into full autonomous.”

Wittenburg said much more is ahead, including further upgrading and refining the “Ask Raleigh” self-service portal for residents that launched last year. In time, he said he wants to find a way for the various overlapping governments — city, county and state — to use AI agents to work together more easily and solve problems for residents quicker.

“An example I give is a pothole,” he said in the interview. “You call in, you want the pothole fixed. It could be a city road, a county road or a state road, and they're all very different processes, but you as a community member just want the pothole fixed, so [we’re] hiding the complexities of government from the community to just provide services.”

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As Detroit weighs renewal, ShotSpotter data raises cost-benefit questions

Katherine Dailey, Michigan Advance — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Michigan Advance.

Determining the effectiveness of a piece of law enforcement technology like ShotSpotter, the gunshot detection system used by Detroit since 2021, is a complicated question — and the metrics to gauge that can change depending on who you ask.

For community members, there might be expectations of reduced gunfire-related crime, Daniel Lawrence, a senior research scientist at the CNA Corporation who has extensively researched gunshot detection tech, explained. For police departments, on the other hand, the benefit is largely expected to be seen in its use as an investigative tool.

With Detroit’s contract for the system up for renewal in June, performance data obtained and analyzed by the Michigan Advance raised concerns about the cost of keeping ShotSpotter in the city, which has paid $7 million for its use over the last approximately three years.

Victims, Witnesses and Shell Casings Found in a Limited Number of ShotSpotter Incidents

According to information shared by SoundThinking Inc., the parent company of ShotSpotter, between 2024 and 2025, the Detroit Police Department responded to a total of 24,225 ShotSpotter-triggered gunfire incidents.

In just over 12% of those incidents, shell casings were recovered based on a ShotSpotter alert. Witnesses were located in just over 2% of incidents. And in less than 1% of the cases was aid rendered to a victim by a first responder.

In an interview in November, Detroit Police Deputy Chief Mark Bliss explained the role that ShotSpotter has played in the department — even including in cases where physical evidence is not present.

“ShotSpotter for us, for what we use it for, has been a game changer for us,” Bliss said. “We use ShotSpotter as an investigative lead. It doesn’t solely rest on itself. It’s an investigative lead, it’s a part of a bigger puzzle.”

“Now, there could be cases where there are no gunshot casings there, maybe people pick them up, maybe they were collected,” he added.

And when there are casings, an alert can be even more helpful. Bliss explained that, even if no one is at the scene of the crime, the NIBIN, or National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, can tie bullet casings at the scene of one incident to the same gun being used in a different shooting.

The Detroit Police Department did not respond to a request for comment on the specific findings of this article.

ShotSpotter is one of a huge range of investigative tools used by the department, including other surveillance technologies like facial recognition and license plate readers. But it comes at a particularly high price tag, which city council members will have to decide this summer if they want to renew it.

“Any tool that the police department is going to use to investigate shooting offenses is probably going to be a benefit to them. It really comes down to the cost associated with that,” Lawrence said. “I don’t think a lot of the conversations around ShotSpotter would be had if it was $1,000 a year for a department to implement. It’s just something that’s very, very expensive and the outcomes associated with it are questionable because you’re not getting these huge reductions in crime that you would hope for at face value.”

And those concerns were echoed by local advocates, including Ramis Wadood, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Michigan, who said the data he had seen from SoundThinking Inc. was “not only embarrassingly low for such an expensive technology but also don’t actually point to real outcomes in criminal investigations.”

“Recovery of bullet casings or even arrests don’t necessarily point to charges and convictions. They don’t point to closed cases. That was the pitch from the city, that this will help us close cases, that this will help us turn evidence into convictions. I’m not hearing outcome-based statistics from SoundThinking or from the police department,” Wadood said.

Bliss noted, however, that whether or not an arrest or a conviction is made in any given case cannot come down to one piece of evidence, like just a ShotSpotter alert.

“There’s so many different pieces to an investigation. ShotSpotter is just one,” he said. “It’s an investigative lead, but it’s gonna depend upon witnesses. It’s gonna depend upon evidence, gonna depend upon forensic outcomes.”

But Wadood also questioned the cost-benefit analysis of such a tool.

“Even if the company or the police department is able to point to a handful of convictions that stem from ShotSpotter alerts, we have to ask ourselves, is the number of convictions that technology led to really worth $7 million over 3 years?” he asked.

DPD Does Not Respond Significantly Faster to ShotSpotter Alerts Than Gunfire-Related 911 Calls

Another argument in favor of ShotSpotter is decreasing the response times for police officers to get to the scene of a shooting — instead of having to collect information, including the location, from a 911 caller, which can take time especially if the person calling is shaken up or emotional, the location data is automatically sent to the department.

Within the DPD system, ShotSpotter alerts are also automatically given the same priority as any other gunfire call — the department gives each 911 call a priority between one and three, with priority one being the most urgent to respond to.

“ShotSpotter is a priority one, because that’s somebody there, somebody fired a gun. So for us, it’s preservation of life,” Bliss said. “We want to get out there as quick as we can, because we don’t know if there’s someone shot.”

But in Detroit, the actual time difference is not particularly significant — and depending on how it’s calculated, is sometimes slower for ShotSpotter alerts, according to data published by the city.

For 911 calls indicating shots fired or a gunshot wound, the average total response time — which includes call intake, dispatch and travel time — is about 12 minutes. For ShotSpotter alerts, the average response time is just over 39 minutes.

Lawrence noted that there can be significant outliers for a number of reasons that can skew data, and that medians can present a more accurate picture of the situation. Using that metric, standard gunfire-related 911 calls have a median response time of 7.6 minutes, while ShotSpotter alerts have a slightly shorter median of 6.9 minutes.

Lawrence was clear, though, that these comparisons are not necessarily an apples-to-apples comparison — a single gunfire event can trigger both a ShotSpotter alert and a 911 call or even multiple of one type of response, and that can skew response time data and make it hard to compare the two directly.

Even still, that data raised concerns for Wadood.

“It is concerning that, for all the money we’re spending on ShotSpotter, the response times are not that great,” he said. “But even if they were a hair better than other 911 calls for shots fired, again, we have to think about whether saving a half minute is a good way of spending $7 million dollars, or if $7 million dollars could be spent to reduce response times in other ways or to prevent crimes in other ways.”

As for the outlier data that shows particularly high response times in a handful of cases, there’s not just one reason why those might exist. But one reason, Lawrence explained, is that if officers have reason to believe that an alert is a false alarm, it may not take priority over other 911 calls.

“If it’s just an alert from ShotSpotter in an area that’s not really known for gun violence, they might not have as much credence towards it,” he said.

In some cities, research has shown that a large proportion of ShotSpotter alerts show no evidence of actual gun crime at the scene — in Chicago, the city’s Inspector General found that around 9% of ShotSpotter alerts had any evidence of a gun-related criminal offense.

Based on that kind of information, especially if a police department is dealing with a high number of calls to respond to, ShotSpotter alerts might not take precedence, Lawrence explained.

Similar data is not publicly available in Detroit, and information on the case status of ShotSpotter incidents requested by the Michigan Advance through the Freedom of Information Act has not been provided, nearly two weeks past the statutory deadline to respond.

“The city’s failure to share this information raises significant concerns about both transparency and accountability around the use of this technology,” Lauren Bonds, the executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, told the Advance.

Bonds said the public should know the details of how often ShotSpotter leads to an arrest so they can determine its effectiveness and whether they want to continue supporting it. Additionally, she said said the technology increases the odds of what she called “false identifications” — instances where police go to a location based on a ShotSpotter alert and make an arrest based on limited other physical evidence, simply because someone was nearby the alert.

“It’s not a supplement for other kinds of policing work. One of the things that we’ve seen with ShotSpotter is that it’s not the most reliable. And so that means it can’t be a substitute for other investigative work to determine where a shot has come from,” Bonds said. “Most of these technologies are also increasing the opportunities for the police to interact with the public, and some members of the public that are intimidated by police, feel harassed by the police, feel over policed.”

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Questions about self-driving cars amplify after one blocked an ambulance responding to Austin shooting

Joshua Fechter, The Texas Tribune — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.

A viral image from the March 1 shooting in downtown Austin — an autonomous vehicle blocking an ambulance from reaching the scene where a gunman fatally wounded three people and injured 15 others — has put a spotlight on driverless cars as they hit the streets in more major Texas cities.

A video widely circulated on social media shows a Waymo vehicle blocking the street as paramedics try to reach the scene of the shooting at Buford’s, in the city’s nightlife district on West 6th Street, forcing the ambulance driver to seek another route.

“This is why we should not have self-driving cars,” an onlooker says in the video.

The encounter didn’t significantly hinder the city’s ability to respond to the shooting, local emergency officials have said, and an Austin police officer was able to move the vehicle within two minutes of arriving at the scene, the video shows.

Nonetheless, the encounter tapped into anxieties about autonomous vehicles as their presence grows on Texas roads — despite evidence that autonomous vehicles tend to be much safer than human drivers.

“Their fatality rate is already much lower,” said Adie Tomer, a senior fellow who studies transportation issues at the Brookings Institute. “The promise is, as the technology improves, that it will get better.”

That doesn’t mean those vehicles are ready to operate on roadways, said Tray Gober, an Austin personal injury lawyer who specializes in vehicle crash cases and has been critical of Waymo.

“Self-driving vehicles are the future,” Gober said. “There will be less crashes because of self-driving vehicles. But the future isn’t today because these vehicles are not ready.”

Sunday’s incident was the latest documented glitch involving autonomous vehicles in Austin — where they have blocked traffic, ignored police officers and illegally passed school buses as they pick up or drop off students.

“If we're dealing with an incident at one of our schools, the last thing that I would want is any autonomous vehicle blocking emergency first responders from being able to quickly access to triage patients or get to the scene,” said Travis Pickford, assistant chief of the Austin ISD Police Department.

In a statement, a Waymo spokesperson said, “Safety is at the core of everything we do. We appreciate the dedication of first responders and remain committed to continuous learning to better serve our riders and the community.”

Austin Trains First Responders on AV Troubleshooting

Texas banned cities from regulating autonomous vehicles in 2017, a move policymakers and transportation experts said was necessary to allow the industry to grow. Texas lawmakers last year directed the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles to draw up more regulations to oversee autonomous vehicle companies operating in the state. Those regulations won’t take effect until May.

In the meantime, self-driving cars have hit the road in more parts of the state. The week before the Austin shooting, Waymo, the autonomous vehicle company, deployed its vehicles in San Antonio, Dallas and Houston. Other companies like Tesla, Volkswagen and Zoox are testing self-driving cars in Austin, according to the Texas Department of Transportation.

Austin has been a testing ground for self-driving cars since the middle of the last decade. While city officials are forbidden from regulating autonomous vehicles, they’ve kept an eye on them and tried to work with operators to work out kinks. According to the city’s website, Austin officials have worked to “collaborate with TxDMV and companies as they enter the market to offer staff's knowledge on the local transportation network to help AVs operate more safely.”

Within a minute and a half of arriving on scene, an Austin police officer commandeered the vehicle and drove it into a nearby parking garage, clearing the roadway.

“We already had a system where a police officer could get in that vehicle and move it. That didn't exist four years ago,” said Jay Blazek Crossley, executive director of the nonprofit Farm & City, a group that advocates for transportation safety measures

Austin officials said emergency responders followed established protocol for interacting with autonomous vehicles. Waymo also has its own guide for law enforcement officers in dealing with its cars, and the company says on its website that it “proactively offers training to first responders where we operate.”

“Our first responders are trained on how to manage driverless vehicles that become stopped or unresponsive,” Captain Christa Stedman, a spokesperson for Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services, said in an email. “This type of scenario is something we prepare for, and it was resolved quickly without a significant impact to patient care or overall response operations.”

Other cities are figuring out how to handle encounters with autonomous vehicles.

In Dallas, emergency officials are still working out protocols for dealing with autonomous vehicles, city spokespeople said.

In San Antonio, the police and fire departments “have received training and quick-reference guidance for safely managing autonomous vehicles, including steps to take if a vehicle becomes unresponsive, how to contact the vendor for immediate support, and how to redirect vehicles away from active incident scenes,” city spokesperson Brian Chasnoff said.

Waymo met with each department late last year “to familiarize our first responders with its vehicles,” Chasnoff said.

Representatives for the city of Houston did not return a request for comment.

Glitches Are Common With AVs but Accidents Are Rare

Austin has documented 230 issues with self-driving cars since the city began tracking them in 2023, a city dashboard shows, including collisions and near misses along with instances where the vehicles ignored police officers’ direction, blocked traffic or posed some other kind of safety concern.

But collisions are rare: Travis County saw 15,872 vehicle crashes in 2024, according to state figures. That year, the city recorded two involving a self-driving car.

That doesn’t mean those incidents don’t pose real danger.

Austin ISD officials found last year that Waymo vehicles had illegally passed school buses on a number of occasions while their stop signs were deployed. No child has been struck, but Pickford worries it could be a matter of time — noting that in California, a Waymo vehicle in January struck a child who suffered minor injuries.

In all, the Austin school district has issued 25 tickets to Waymo since August, Pickford said. The company had knowledge of its vehicles’ activity, he said, because each ticket issued by the district’s police department was paid on time.

When district officials brought the matter to the company’s attention at a meeting with Waymo representatives in November, company officials initially rejected the district’s assessment that the cars posed a threat to students and refused a request for the company to pause operations during pick-up and drop-off hours, Pickford said.

In the meantime, Waymo cars continued to rack up violations, he said. Human drivers, Pickford said, tend not to reoffend once they’re ticketed.

“The Waymos were not learning, and that was concerning to us,” Pickford said.

Waymo issued a software update in November after meeting with district officials, Pickford said. In December, the company collected data on the district’s school buses with the apparent goal of improving their vehicles’ ability to recognize and respond to school bus signals.

That month, Waymo issued a software recall after its buses also failed to yield to school buses in Atlanta — two months after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an investigation into the company. The NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board have each begun probes into the company for its vehicles’ failures to stop for school buses.

A preliminary NTSB report released this week found that one Waymo vehicle illegally passed an Austin ISD school bus in January because one of the company’s remote assistance agents, employees who help the cars' system navigate unclear driving circumstances, incorrectly told the car it could do so.

Meanwhile, Texas is standing up its own regulatory framework.

At the end of May, Texas will require autonomous vehicle operators to gain authorization from the state Department of Motor Vehicles before their cars can carry passengers on Texas roads.

Companies must certify in writing that their vehicles are “capable of operating in compliance with applicable traffic and motor vehicle laws,” among other requirements, in order to gain that authorization. Operators must also provide a copy of a plan specifying how emergency responders “should interact with the automated motor vehicle” should they encounter one.

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Breaking down silos and building collaboration can boost government agencies

Michael Botos — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Fragmentation. Resource constraints. Capacity gaps.

These are just a few of the challenges confronting state and local government agencies working to fulfill their mission amidst tightening budgets.

A more efficient path forward focuses on cross-agency, cross-ecosystem collaboration, starting with a strategic roadmap to align the organization on a common purpose and engage external partners through public-private collaborations.

Strategic Roadmap

Building a strategic roadmap is needed to increase and improve collaboration in government agencies. This roadmap should be informed by the decades of cross-sector collaboration and lessons learned in the private sector. The details of each step on this roadmap should be defined in a way that leads to more efficient and scalable government organizational structures and operating models.

One concept that has worked well in the private sector is imagining the organization five years in the future and defining a portfolio of initiatives and investments in people, process, technology and data required to achieve that future. We have found this ‘future-back’ approach helps to challenge the status quo, inspire new ways of thinking and encourage cross-agency collaboration in government organizations.

Another approach is thinking through ‘jobs to be done’ for various stakeholders, including constituent personas, business partners and collaborative stakeholders. What should the future look like? Once a roadmap is in place for that vision, the agency can work backwards and fix issues along the way to migrate the organization’s programs, services and operating model toward that desired future state.

For example, we recently worked with a state Medicaid agency to align leadership on a 10-year aspirational purpose statement as part of their systems modernization program. We reimagined the future by mapping the end-to-end, cross-constituent experience for multiple personas, identifying unmet needs and future capability requirements and developing a prioritized and sequenced portfolio of process, technology and organizational initiatives to achieve the organization’s purpose.

A Common Purpose

This future-back approach only works if the organization is aligned on a shared mission, vision, values and purpose across various departments, divisions and functions. Many government organizations have not taken the time to explicitly define an aspirational and motivational purpose statement — a mission-driven concept that is core to public service.

Aligning on a common purpose to focus the organization’s strategic roadmap can help inform decisions on where and how to build better operating models and improve collaboration in the government and public sector.

Too many agencies, departments and programs operate independently, often resulting in duplicative functions and capabilities across the organization. Increased internal, cross-agency collaboration focused on a clear purpose should reduce this fragmentation, create greater efficiency and support a culture in which workers are more aware of what is happening outside their areas of focus.

Likewise, improving external collaboration through public-private partnerships could increase efficiency and effectiveness of programs and services.

Public-Private Sector Collaboration

While these approaches can make a difference, there are equally significant benefits to be gained through external and public-private sector collaboration. Aligning public sector goals with private sector priorities can create mutual benefits while improving outcomes. In fact, public sector leaders are increasingly exploring new approaches to collaboration with private sector organizations to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

In the health sector, we are working with several state government health and human services organizations to establish hub-and-spoke networks of community partners that address social determinants of health such as food insecurity and transportation.

This journey has just begun and will transform the future of health care delivery. The opportunity for government organizations to do more with less will be enabled by public-private sector collaboration.

The Future

There are no easy solutions. However, by breaking down internal and external silos we can begin to inspire innovation, collaboration and ultimately transformation of government agencies. For government agencies, the future will be defined by internal, cross-agency collaboration and external, public-private sector collaboration.

Michael Botos is EY-Parthenon Americas’ public sector strategy, innovation and transformation leader

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States tackle transparency in early responses to workplace surveillance tech

Kaitlyn Levinson — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:54:58 -0500

There are few places left in the U.S. that don’t have some sort of technology tracking a person’s movement, whether that be driving past license plate readers, passing by a doorbell camera or using social media on their cell phones. Surveillance tools have also permeated many workplaces across the nation, but state lawmakers are increasingly establishing employee privacy protections to prevent potential harms and abuse of such monitoring tech.

Maine became the latest state to take legislative action against surveillance and monitoring tools in the workplace. State lawmakers enacted a law in January aimed at increasing transparency of public and private employers’ use of computers, telephones, photo-electronic systems and other devices to monitor their staff.

The law prohibits employers from deploying such systems without notifying prospective workers and requires them to also provide annual notice to all employees impacted by surveillance systems. Under the legislation, workers also have the right to decline their employer’s request to install tracking and data collection tools on personal devices for surveillance purposes.

Maine’s efforts reflect a growing trend among policymakers to reign in the rise of workplace surveillance technology, said Edgar Ndjatou, executive director of Workplace Fairness, a nonprofit dedicated to researching and promoting workers’ rights.

“In the past decade, [particularly] with COVID-19 and people working more remotely, employers got very nervous around productivity and what people were doing or not doing at home,” he said.

The desire to maintain productivity led to a rise of “bossware, or software that employers use to monitor you, whether it’s monitoring … how many emails you’re opening, accessing your computer camera to see if you’re actually working when you say you’re working … or monitoring your keystrokes to see if you’re actually being productive throughout the work day,” he explained.

State and local governments in particular could be drawn to deploying surveillance tech as they “face budget crunches,” so “using monitoring [tools] to make sure you’re getting the biggest bang for your buck out of your workers” or “to augment workplace functions,” like monitoring performance or flagging worker behavior that requires discipline,” said Hayley Tsukayama, director of state affairs at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit.

As employers increasingly turn to tech services to regulate the workplace, states are also beginning to “catch up or at least trying to address a trend that has become really clear in the workplace over the past few years,” she said.

At least three states, including Connecticut, Delaware and New York, already mandate that employers notify employees when their phone, email or internet usage may be subject to monitoring.

As more state leaders take legislative action to regulate workplace monitoring, policymakers are targeting transparency measures in their early adoption of workplace surveillance laws, Tsukayama said.

In Michigan, Rep. Penelope Tsernoglou, a Democrat, proposed a bill last month that would allow employers to deploy electronic monitoring tools — including computers, cameras, telephones and other devices — for purposes like assessing certain employees’ performance or monitoring production processes or quality.

If passed, the bill includes several measures to prevent potential harm and abuse of workplace monitoring tech, such as requiring employers to provide written notice that they are subject to monitoring tools, to obtain written consent from staff subject to electronic monitoring and to allow individuals to correct any incorrect data collected about them.

More broadly, the bill directs employers to leverage a monitoring service “through the least invasive means possible” and “ensure the tool applies to the smallest number of covered individuals, collects the least amount of data, and is used no more frequently than necessary.”

A similar effort was underway in California last year, after lawmakers considered a bill that would have restricted public and private sector employers’ use of surveillance tools.

Under the bill, which died on the state’s Senate floor in September, employers would have been prohibited from leveraging video, audio, geolocation and other data tracking methods for monitoring staff productivity and performance in “employee-only, employer-designated” environments, like break rooms, off-duty situations, locker rooms and other spaces. Employers would also have been required to post signage in certain instances to notify staff if they were subject to certain surveillance tools.

California lawmakers are now considering a separate law introduced last month that would limit public and private employers’ use of surveillance tools and employee data to inform decisions that would impact their performance evaluation, productivity requirements, compensation and other factors.

Indeed, the adoption of surveillance tools opens the door for employers to analyze employee data more closely, which is why “I really encourage employers [and policymakers] to consider how damaging these technologies can be if it’s not rolled out transparently,” Tsukayama said.

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‘Unmet needs’ persist in Tribal broadband despite progress, report finds

Chris Teale — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 13:00:00 -0500

Late last year, the federal government took what it said were two significant steps towards reducing the persistent digital divide on Tribal lands.

In November, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced it was working on various “reforms” to streamline the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program and other programs ahead of a new grant funding opportunity this spring, which was estimated to be worth at least $500 million. The following month, NTIA awarded $6.5 million in grant funding under the TBCP to nine applicants ahead of consultations with Tribal leaders as it prepared to restructure various broadband programs.

But a recent report found that while those efforts and others might offer some encouragement that Tribal lands, a lot of work lies ahead if the digital divide is to truly be closed there. Researchers at the nonprofit Urban Institute said communities still have “unmet needs” when it comes to connectivity, and the complex federal grant process — plus the time and money it takes to get broadband projects built — are just some of the barriers they still face.

“We know that Tribal nations are doing a lot of this difficult work and grappling with all of these decisions and challenges and building out robust infrastructure in their communities already,” said Tomi Rajninger, a research analyst in the Housing and Communities Division at the Urban Institute and a report co-author. “And we know that in the midst of uncertain federal funding and still unmet needs, especially with regards to the maintenance and ongoing operations costs of these networks, it's going to be even harder going forward.”

The TBCP, funded by the 2021 infrastructure law, set aside an unprecedented $3 billion to invest in Tribal broadband, which traditionally has been left behind by internet service providers and governments. The Government Accountability Office has spent years calling for better data and a national strategy to boost connectivity on Tribal lands to little avail, while coverage maps have been derided as not reflecting the on-the-ground reality.

But even as more money has been made available for broadband projects on reservations and other Tribal areas, the Urban Institute said they still struggle with a lack of knowledge and expertise on how to navigate the sometimes-complex federal grant process. But the report’s authors said some Tribal governments have “built out muscle” to apply for broadband grants as they can build on successful awards in other areas, so there is room for optimism.

Making things more challenging, however, are the often-complex ownership structures around Tribal land, where some stretches might be held in trust by the federal government, while nearby plots might be privately owned or controlled by the U.S. Forest Service. Getting a successful grant application under those circumstances would be challenging for anyone, the report notes.

“These processes can be difficult for anyone applying; they're just pretty onerous,” said Amanda Hermans, a research associate in the Urban Institute’s Housing and Communities Division and a report co-author. “We heard from folks that you really need to have a professional federal grant writer on staff or on contract to get through these processes. There's a lot of quirks to them, and the applications require certain processes that you may just not know intuitively, unless you've been through it before.”

And even if a Tribe successfully lands a grant to build out broadband, getting the infrastructure installed and then maintained presents challenges of its own. That has prompted some Tribes to look to manage the projects and networks themselves, the report found, and assert their “digital sovereignty,” where Tribes manage their own networks, infrastructure and data and control any of its use. Hermans said it is a “more prominent and growing movement across Indian Country.”

“It stems from a history of being taken advantage of, and historic disinvestment in these areas, distrust of government, distrust of neighbors, because of unfortunate historic circumstances, but it also gives these communities more power to control their own resources,” she said. “Economically, if they are able to stand up an ISP and use the revenues from that to further serve their communities in other ways that's really important and impactful, and can be huge.”

The report called on Tribes to be flexible when applying for grant funding and have a plan in place to ensure broadband projects’ long-term viability, while also investing in areas like workforce development to expand their technical capabilities. The Urban Institute also urged the federal government to offer more technical assistance during the grantmaking process, as well as waiving certain requirements or funding long-term maintenance as well as construction. Philanthropic organizations can also play a role, the report says, especially as more federal funds may be uncertain in the future.

“We also heard a lot of uncertainty and concern about the changing federal funding priorities,” Rajninger said. “TBCP was unprecedented, and the infrastructure law did do a lot of broadband funding in addition for non-native communities in a lot of rural areas, but there's not any clear sense if that funding will ever come in the same quantity again, and in this way.”

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Kalshi and Polymarket are skirting laws on sports betting, states say

Kevin Hardy, Stateline — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0500

This article was originally published by Stateline.

Online prediction markets allow users to put money on the outcome of almost anything — this weekend’s NBA game between the Warriors and the Thunder, the next supreme leader of Iran, whether the government will confirm the existence of aliens.

But those markets have no state oversight and operate even in states that ban gambling.

The platforms are raising bipartisan alarms, especially related to sports gambling. As states have legalized sports betting in recent years, they’ve required legal sportsbooks to jump through multiple hoops — from age verification procedures to protections for gambling addiction to tax collections. Online prediction markets circumvent all those rules.

Platforms including Kalshi and Polymarket say they are offering contracts similar to commodity markets that speculate on the future price of corn or oil — not outright gambling. But a growing number of states are rejecting those justifications, arguing the platforms are offering a backdoor to skirt state gambling regulations, particularly on sports.

The issue has sparked action from state regulators, new legislation, and lawsuits from both states and prediction markets. Complicating matters are the federal government’s moves to block state regulation of prediction markets, which see more than $13 billion in transactions each month.

Most activity on those platforms revolves around sports. And in national ads, Kalshi even marketed itself as the first national legal sports betting platform — even though states approve and regulate sports gambling since a 2018 Supreme Court decision. In 11 states, sports gambling remains illegal.

“This is sports wagering. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably sports wagering, in this situation,” said Kentucky state Rep. Michael Meredith, a Republican.

Meredith, who sponsored a 2023 law that legalized sports betting in Kentucky, called for states to regulate prediction markets during a webinar hosted by the National Conference of State Legislatures. That organization, representing state legislators across the country, has urged Congress “to act swiftly to address the rapid growth of unregulated sports‑related event contracts.”

State leaders argue their longstanding authority to oversee gambling should allow states to regulate or ban prediction market platforms. But those companies maintain they are not beholden to state regulations.

“I think it’s very clear that this authority should be vested in our state governments,” Meredith said last month.

In New York, lawmakers are considering legislation that would ban prediction markets from offering contracts on sports events, in addition to natural disasters, acts of terrorism and deaths. In Nevada, where gambling and tourism are top economic drivers, regulators are involved in a protracted legal fight after the state sought to stop prediction market activity on sports.

“To me, this is clearly gambling,” Thomas Reeg, CEO of Caesars Entertainment, which operates casinos and sports betting, said during a company earnings call in January.

But states are also fighting an obscure federal agency seeking to protect the emerging marketplace. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates derivatives such as futures contracts on stocks, has asserted it has “exclusive jurisdiction” over prediction markets and promised to fight state regulatory efforts in court.

The CTFC did not respond to Stateline’s request for comment. Neither did Kalshi or Polymarket, two of the leading prediction market companies.

A New Wave of Betting

Unless Congress passes legislation, experts say the courts will ultimately decide what role states can play in regulating prediction markets.

The standoff has led to litigation between the platforms and states in at least eight states, and officials in 11 states have sent cease and desist orders to prediction market companies, according to the American Gaming Association, an industry group representing casinos and sports books. A bipartisan group of attorneys general from 39 states and the District of Columbia recently urged a federal court to uphold state authority to regulate sports gambling.

The American Gaming Association says prediction markets should either get out of the sports betting business or follow the same regulations and rules that apply to sportsbooks such as DraftKings and FanDuel.

“They don’t want to pay the taxes, they don’t want to undergo the compliance and provide all of the consumer protections that are required by states of operators who operate legal sports betting,” said Tres York, the vice president of government relations for the association.

The organization estimates states have lost out on more than $570 million in sports gambling tax revenues since prediction markets began offering sports events contracts.

Many state leaders and experts are already concerned about the societal effects from the meteoric rise of sports gambling, which has transformed collegiate and professional sports, and the potential for manipulation by players.

“If you already have what I would call an epidemic of sports betting addiction in this country when you have regulated sports betting, imagine what it’s going to be like when you have essentially unregulated sports betting,” said Benjamin Schiffrin, director of securities policy at Better Markets, a nonprofit watchdog group advocating for consumer and investor financial protections.

The wide range of available bets also is raising alarms over election integrity and insider trading. In addition to individual elections, prediction markets have allowed wagers on the ouster of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the timing of the U.S. strike on Iran. Last week, hundreds of thousands of dollars were bet the day before the Iranian strikes, and more than 100 accounts cashed in $10,000 or more from successful predictions, according to a New York Times analysis.

“It’s a huge change to all of a sudden allow betting on elections, and it really threatens the underpinnings of our democracy,” Schiffrin said. “It just seems like there’s tremendous potential for wrongdoing.”

On its website, Kalshi says it operates under a “strict regulatory framework” with a suite of market integrity, surveillance, financial safeguards, and anti-manipulation protections.

Federal-State Conflict

Citing what it called “an onslaught” of state litigation, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission last month filed a court brief underscoring its authority to regulate prediction markets.

“To those who seek to challenge our authority in this space, let me be clear: We will see you in court,” Commissioner Mike Selig said in a video posted on social media. Selig is the only member of the presidentially appointed commission, which currently has four vacancies.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, immediately vowed to oppose the federal agency and the prediction platforms in court. Gambling has been banned under the Utah Constitution since the state’s founding, and Cox posted on social media that prediction markets are “destroying the lives of families.”

Kalshi swiftly sued the governor and the state in federal court in anticipation of enforcement efforts and pending legislation in Salt Lake City. The company’s lawsuit cited the governor’s post and a column penned by Republican Attorney General Derek Brown explaining why he joined Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, a Democrat, “in urging Congress to address offshore gambling operations that disregard state law and target young Americans.”

Utah Republican state Rep. Joseph Elison sponsored the legislation cited in Kalshi’s lawsuit. The bill, which has passed both chambers, would expand the state’s definition of gambling to include proposition betting — bets on the performance of an individual player or team that don’t necessarily affect the outcome of a competition. While Elison acknowledged the courts will ultimately determine the issue, he said prediction markets are essentially offering proposition betting without authorization.

”We’re 50 independent sovereigns that gave centralized government to the federal government to do certain things,” he told Stateline. “But the rest, we want those things to be under our purview. And this is one of those.”

The Legal Landscape

In early rulings on the matter, courts have issued a mix of opinions: States have found initial success in state courts while results have been more mixed in federal courts, said Daniel Wallach, a gaming and sports gambling attorney tracking the issue.

But federal law has long affirmed state authority to oversee gambling, he said.

Despite attempts to cast transactions as investments, Wallach says courts will look at the substance of bets, which he said are almost indistinguishable from those made in state-regulated betting markets.

“The argument that this is investing rather than gambling is essentially elevating form over substance,” he said. “Plain and simple, this is wagering on the outcome of a sporting event.”

Wallach said state efforts such as cease and desist orders are counterproductive, as they essentially invite federal lawsuits from prediction market firms. He said states are better off pursuing gambling enforcement efforts in state courts, where several have won preliminary injunctions halting operations of the platforms temporarily.

For now, he said the federal agency has applied almost no scrutiny of the platforms, noting that the president’s family has a financial interest in the industry.

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, has a business interest in two of the largest online prediction markets, and the president’s social media platform Truth Social announced it would start its own prediction market, according to The New York Times.

Journalist Dustin Gouker, who authors newsletters on gambling and prediction markets, noted that the CFTC rules that currently regulate prediction markets were built for financial products — not gambling. He said prediction markets have moved into the gaming market because “nobody said no.”

“It’s a bit of a mess,” he said. “If we’re going to have betting in 50 states for everyone 18 and over, shouldn’t we have thought about that a little bit more?”

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org.

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He saw an abandoned trailer. Then, he uncovered a surveillance network on California's border

Khari Johnson and Wendy Fry, The Markup — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0500

This article was originally published on The Markup and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

On a cracked two-lane road on the eastern edge of San Diego County, James Cordero eased his Jeep onto the shoulder after something caught his eye. It looked like an abandoned trailer. Inside he found a hidden camera feeding a vast surveillance network that logs the license plate of every driver passing through this stretch of remote backcountry between San Diego and the Arizona state line.

Cordero, 44, has found dozens of these cameras hidden in trailers and construction barrels on border roads around San Diego and Imperial counties: one on Old Highway 80 near Jacumba Hot Springs; another outside the Golden Acorn Casino in Campo; another along Interstate 8 toward In-Ko-Pah Gorge.

They started showing up after California granted permits to the Border Patrol and other federal agencies to place license plate readers on state highways in the last months of the Biden administration. Now as many as 40 are feeding information into Trump administration databases as the Democratic-led state chafes over the federal government’s massive deportation program.

The cameras are raising concerns with privacy experts, civil liberties advocates and humanitarian aid workers who say California should not be supporting the surveillance and data-collection program, which they view as an unwarranted government intrusion into the lives of Americans who’ve committed no crime. Moreover, they say the program conflicts with state law.

Supporters say the devices allow law enforcement to quickly identify and locate people they suspect of serious crimes. They also argue the cameras help agencies spot patterns in drug and human trafficking, and could be used to help locate missing persons, such as children or other vulnerable people.

“If you’re not doing anything illegal, why worry about it?” said long-time Jacumba resident Allen Stanks, 70.

“Everyone is talking about privacy, OK. Stop putting everything on Facebook. ‘Here’s a picture of my food.’ Who cares?” said Stanks.

Some locals, however, suspect the cameras are behind some unusual encounters they’ve had in recent months with officers from Border Patrol and its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection. In one case agents questioned a grandmother – a lawful permanent resident – about why she went to a casino, according to her grandson.

Cordero has a different concern. On his days off, he leads volunteers into the far reaches of the county, leaving water, food and clothing for migrants. He fears his colleagues could be detained by agents.

“I’m not so much worried about myself, but I’m worried about a lot of our volunteers that come out,” said Cordero. “I don’t want them to have to deal with any of the nonsense of being tracked or being pulled over and questioned.”

He has good reason to be nervous. During the first Trump administration, federal officials prosecuted volunteers from the humanitarian group "No More Deaths" for leaving water and supplies for migrants in the Arizona desert. The volunteers faced charges, including "abandonment of property" and felony harboring, though the convictions for some were later overturned.

Border Patrol provides little information about its use of license plate readers on its website. In 2020, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report that describes the technology in general, but doesn’t specify where it’s being used. The Markup and CalMatters reached out to Border Patrol and Homeland Security officials for comment, but did not receive a response.

“There’s no transparency, that's the worst part,” Cordero said.

The Homeland Security report says some readers are capturing license plate numbers, as well as the make and model of the vehicle, the state the vehicle is registered in, the camera owner and type, the GPS coordinates for where the image was taken, and the date and time of the capture.

The “technology may also capture (within the image) the environment surrounding a vehicle, which may include drivers and passengers,” the report states. It also says feds can access license plate readers operated by commercial vendors.

Mapping Hidden Cameras

Earlier this month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a coalition of 30 organizations sent a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom and the California Department of Transportation urging them to revoke state permits and remove the covert readers operated by federal agencies like Customs and Border Protection and the Drug Enforcement Agency along California border highways.

The San Francisco-based privacy and civil rights advocacy organization, also known as EFF, mapped out more than 40 hidden license plate readers in Southern California, most of them along border roadways. It contends the devices bypass a 2016 state law that spells out how law enforcement agencies can use automated license plate readers, which are often referred to as ALPRs.

“By allowing Border Patrol and the DEA to put license plate readers along the border, they’re essentially bypassing the protections under (California law),” said Dave Maass, the director of investigations for EFF. “That is a backdoor around it.”

Maass said he believes Cordero’s concerns about the agency surveilling humanitarian volunteers may be valid.

“They claim they might be looking for smugglers or they might be looking for cartel members, but that’s not who they’re collecting data on,” said Maass. “(The program) is primarily collecting data on people who live in the region.

Maass said there’s no way to be certain which agency is installing each camera, but his organization checked with all other agencies operating in the area, such as the San Diego and Imperial sheriff’s departments, the California Highway Patrol, and Cal Fire, among others.

The camera models currently installed on state highways in the border region are the same as ones the Border Patrol purchased in large amounts, according to Maass. Records obtained from Caltrans by EFF from 2016 appear to show Drug and Enforcement Administration and Border Patrol requesting permits to install the same devices in other parts of San Diego County, according to Maass.

Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for comment. The governor’s office did not comment. The Drug Enforcement Agency also did not respond to a request for comment.

Caltrans Approves ALPR Requests

By day, Cordero works in water-damage restoration, the crews residents call after floods and burst pipes. Comfortable with emergencies, he’s the type of guy you’d hope to run into if your car broke down in the middle of nowhere.

“People are literally dying out here,” Cordero says of his volunteer work, done through the nonprofit Al Otro Lado, a legal services organization that also provides humanitarian support to refugees, migrants and deportees on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. “All we’re trying to do is prevent people from dying.”

In response to questions from The Markup and CalMatters, a spokesperson for Caltrans provided a written statement that the state agency has approved eight permits for license plate readers from federal agencies, like Customs and Border Protection and the Drug Enforcement Administration, to be stationed in state highway rights-of-way.

“Caltrans does not operate, manage, or determine the specific use of technology or equipment installed by permit holders, nor does it have access to any of the collected data,” the statement read in part.

Caltrans said federal immigration agencies haven’t requested permits for the cameras since June 2024. They did not say how long a permit lasts. Between 2015 and 2024, their records indicate Customs and Border Protection and the Drug Enforcement Administration requested 14 permit applications for “law enforcement surveillance devices.” Of the 14, eight were approved, four were cancelled by the applicants and two did not result in projects in state right-of-way, the agency said.

In California, license plates are tracked not only by the federal government and law enforcement, but also by schools and businesses, including some Home Depots and malls. While schools and businesses may not agree to pass that information on to the federal government, local police with access to those cameras may do so.

California law prevents state and local agencies from sharing license plate data with out-of-state entities, including federal agencies involved in immigration enforcement. A Markup and CalMatters investigation in June 2025 revealed that southern California law enforcement agencies, including sheriff’s departments in San Diego and Orange counties, haveshared automated license plate reader data with federal agencies in violation of state law.

Newsom vetoed a bill to strengthen California license plate reader law last fall. Two days later, Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against the city of El Cajon for multiple violations ofthe license plate sharing prohibition. Since 2024, the attorney general’s office has sent letters to 18 law enforcement agencies, including the Imperial County Sheriff’s Office, the San Diego Police Department, and the El Centro Police Department.

Local agencies continue to share license plate data with federal immigration authorities, and not just along the border. The San Pablo Police Department in Northern California, one of the law enforcement agencies that received letters from the attorney general’s office, shared license plate data with the Border Patrol as recently as last month, according to records obtained by Oakland Privacy head of research Mike Katz-Lacabe. Some cameras are easy to spot, but Katz-Lacabe said that local police have concealed cameras that scan license plates for more than a decade, sometimes behind the grill of police cruisers or inside speed limit trailers or in a fake saguaro cactus.

“This has been the practice for years,” he said.

On a recent Saturday, Cordero was dressed for the remote border terrain – flannel, hiking boots, a San Diego Padres cap pulled low against the sun. His dirt-caked Jeep is built for places roads don’t go. On this particular weekend, supplies at one of the drop sites had already been used, indicating people may be crossing in the area.

Cordero has gotten good at finding stuff out here. In the remote Ocotillo washes, where the scrubs claw at people’s shins, he recently found what he believes to be the remains of a human finger.

A year earlier, Cordero found a phone contact list next to human remains. He and his wife, Jacqueline Arellano, were able to use the phone list to notify the person’s family in Arizona about where their missing loved one fell.

That’s why when, months ago, he first saw the abandoned trailer along the side of the road on Old Highway 80, he had to stop to take a closer look.

“It took me passing by a few times before I realized what it was,” said Cordero.

Pulling Over Grandma

An Associated Press investigation published in November revealed that Border Patrol had hidden license plate readers in ordinary traffic safety equipment. The data collected by the agency’s plate readers was fed into a predictive intelligence program monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide to identify and detain people whose travel patterns the algorithm deemed suspicious, according to the AP’s investigation.

Sergio Ojeda, a community organizer with the mutual aid group Imperial Valley Equity and Justice said CBP apparently believed his grandmother’s driving patterns were suspicious because they interrogated her about the amount of time she spends at local casinos in the area.

“She was outraged about it,” said Ojeda. His grandmother, a resident of Imperial Valley with legal status, was crossing the border when agents asked her about her trips to casinos.

“She asked them back, ‘Is something wrong with that? Am I not supposed to be doing that or why are you questioning me about this?’ and they were like “Oh, no, it just seems suspicious,” Ojeda recounted.

Ojeda said he was equally concerned, and he doesn’t enjoy the feeling of being watched just because he lives near the border. “It’s how I feel every day,” he said. “Driving around, I joke with my co-workers: ‘Which chapter of 1984 is this?’”

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Strength in numbers: Nonprofit launches consortium to improve public health data and outcomes

Kaitlyn Levinson — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:45:51 -0500

Public health data systems are a critical piece of government, helping leaders track threats like viral outbreaks or assess the impacts of poor air quality to improve resident outcomes and safeguard their communities. But obtaining and maintaining access to such data resources remains a challenge, which is where a new collaborative effort among private and public organizations intends to fill in the gap.

The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials is building a public health data consortium that aims to establish a data exchange among public health agencies in a bid to improve health data accessibility and quality, the nonprofit announced last month.

The consortium serves as an “additive” to ongoing efforts among federal, state and local governments to modernize public health data infrastructure, said Dr. Jen Layden, senior vice president at ASTHO.

One such effort, she noted, is the Consolidated Appropriations Act signed by President Donald Trump last month that includes $360 million for supporting public health infrastructure and capacity and $185 million to modernize data surveillance and analytics for state and local health departments.

Even with that boost, “public health funding is always underfunded,” Layden said, which impacts data quality and access for health jurisdictions.

“Data is vital to the work we do in public health to detect outbreaks … identify novel threats, understand trends [and] provide information” for communities, but public health systems “haven’t historically been very integrated,” she said.

A disparate, antiquated public health data ecosystem "hinders not just the work of public health, but it hinders people understanding about diseases and trusting [public health agencies] as a good source of information,” Layden said.

To better inform public health decisions, and ultimately, strengthen communities’ trust in those efforts, ASTHO’s consortium will connect public and private organizations’ resources. The cross-sector collaboration will expand the breadth of available data to health departments, including “real-world data” that jurisdictions may not have access to otherwise, like commercial lab data or medical and pharmacy claims data, Layden explained.

The consortium can help bolster data collection and analysis efforts on priority areas for many states, like maternal health and disease surveillance to prevent and more efficiently manage outbreaks like measles, she said.

Health care data firm Veritas Data Research, will support the consortium’s data exchange by offering agencies access to leverage its platform and other data resources. HealthVerity, a health data analytics company, will also provide identity resolution and data privacy support for the consortium.

“Under the governance of ASTHO, all state and territorial health agencies can securely pool their data to improve clinical practice and innovation,” Jason LaBonte, CEO at Veritas Data Research, a health care data firm, said in a statement. “In return, the agencies can combine their data with national real-world data to power better public health.”

ASTHO is currently conducting outreach and accepting inquiries from interested state participants, Layden said, and the nonprofit hopes to have six to eight jurisdictions onboarded in the next couple of months to help inform the consortium’s early priorities, such as mortality data.

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Lots of questions, but little pushback on Maryland bill to allow driverless cars

Rhiannon Evans, Maryland Matters — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0500

This story was published by Maryland Matters.

Waymo executives see an opportunity. Teamsters see a threat. Ronza Othman just sees a chance to get a ride without being discriminated against.

“Just yesterday, I was late to work because a rideshare driver refused to take me,” said Othman, the president of the National Federation of the Blind of Maryland. “He said, quote, ‘It’s not worth the money,’ since he could get more rides in the time it would take for him to help me.”

Othman’s comments came during a Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee hearing Wednesday on Senate Bill 909, Sen. Sara Love’s (D-Montgomery) bill to allow “fully autonomous vehicles” — or driverless cars — to operate in Maryland.

Autonomous vehicles would provide freedom of movement to those who are unable to drive, a safer alternative to human drivers and an opportunity for existing companies to grow around an emerging technology, Love testified during the nearly two hours of hearing on her bill.

SB 909 and a companion bill, House Bill 1295, sponsored by Del. Natalie Ziegler (D-Howard and Montgomery), would allow driverless cars to operate in the state as long as certain technical standards and specifications are met. Senators peppered the witnesses with technical questions about driverless cars, but did not seem to be opposed to the idea.

Othman said autonomous vehicles would be a “true game changer for people with disabilities.”

John Seng, founder and chair of Safe Roads Maryland, a nonprofit focused on improving road safety in Maryland, testified the driverless services like Waymo remove the most dangerous part of driving: the human element. Waymos can’t “drive inebriated, chew edibles, drive distracted or speed,” Seng said.

Maryland lawmakers are considering bills to let driverless ride-share companies like Waymo operate in Maryland. A Waymo car was on display at the State House Wednesday morning. (Photo Bryan P. Sears/Maryland Matters)

But where Seng sees a positive in removing the human element, drivers see a concern. Thomas Doyle, the state program director for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, testified that there are thousands of Teamsters within the state who drive professionally for a living.

“These Teamsters, and all professional drivers are relevant stakeholders whose concerns need to be heard when we are examining this bill,” Doyle said. “Do we really believe that the technology’s there?”

In addition to technological concerns, Doyle noted that the bill would allow “fleet technicians” — humans in a driverless car who can take over remotely if needed — who are not licensed drivers in Maryland and may be unfamiliar with our roads and rules.

But Ethan Teicher, a spokesperson for autonomous driving technology company Waymo, said autonomous vehicles are often safer than human drivers.

“The data shows that the [Waymo] technology is involved in 90% fewer serious injuries or worse crashes compared to human drivers,” said Teicher, who showed off one of the company’s cars outside the State House earlier Wednesday.

Waymo currently operates fully autonomous cars in 10 major U.S. cities, including Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston and Atlanta. The company is looking to expand into Baltimore, Teicher said.

Waymo already has about a dozen cars in the city, driven by professional drivers to acquaint the technology with the city. It is not offering rides to passengers in Baltimore yet, Teicher said.

If the bills are passed, the company would slowly phase out the professional drivers in Baltimore. It would start by using the autonomous technology with professional drivers behind the wheel, and as safety benchmarks are met, the cars could move toward operating without a driver behind the wheel, Teicher said.

When asked about the impacts of autonomous vehicles on rideshare drivers, Teicher said “there’s going to be some kind of transition,” as to what rideshare jobs would look like in the future.

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As autonomous vehicle services expand, he said, Waymo will need a team of professionals to support its fleet, such as staff to aid with technology updates, fleet technicians to work on the cars and construction and skilled trade workers to build necessary infrastructure like charging facilities and depots.

“Certainly, we want to partner with the state to make sure those opportunities stay local and get in the hands of people who need them,” Teicher said.

Despite the concerns about jobs, Seng believes the bills will only serve to increase roadway safety.

“No technology or law is a panacea, it’s one size fits all. Increasing road safety means decreasing fatalities, injuries and crashes,” Seng said.

Maryland Matters is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: editor@marylandmatters.org.

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Oklahoma lawmakers move to protect ratepayers from effects of data centers

Emma Murphy, Oklahoma Voice — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0500

This story was originally published by the Oklahoma Voice.

OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma ratepayers’ energy bills would be unaffected by new data centers under a bill advancing through the House.

Rep. Brad Boles, R-Marlow, said his measure, House Bill 2992, will put safeguards and protections into state statute to ensure new data centers are paying for their own infrastructure and the energy they consume, rather than other consumers.

“We’re seeing historic growth in Oklahoma with our power generation requirements,” Boles said. “And a lot of this will be coming, most likely, from data centers.”

There are at least 30 data centers in Oklahoma that are currently operating, planned or under construction, according to reporting by News9.

Boles said it’s difficult to track the number of data centers in the state because the Oklahoma Corporation Commission does not regulate all utility companies, and therefore doesn’t track all existing infrastructure.

The bill would require new “large load customers,” such as data centers, cryptocurrency mining operations and artificial intelligence computing facilities, to establish their own contracts with electric suppliers.

Data centers have faced increasing criticism for using up water and power, adding to the already-existing strain on those resources.

“The scale of power generation capacity that they’re going to need is significantly higher than anything we’ve ever seen, and so that’s why it’s just such a huge power demand,” Boles said. “If that volume requires our utility companies to build infrastructure to support that volume, then the utility companies have to take these risks and to get money and build hundreds of millions of dollars of power generation.”

The measure would apply to all utility companies in Oklahoma, including those not regulated by the state, according to the bill language.

The Corporation Commission is also working on something similar to his measure, Boles said, but he still thinks it’s important to have the safeguards in state statute.

Rep. Jim Grego, R-Wilburton, asked how ratepayers will be protected if these data centers leave the state or go out of business.

Boles said large-load customers would be required to sign contracts to pay for their infrastructure costs over 10 years.

“Part of the bill also requires collateral from these companies so that if they go out of business before their contract is paid up for their infrastructure, that the utility companies will have collateral to collect from that group to ensure we don’t have any stranded costs that get passed on to the ratepayers of Oklahoma,” he said.

Existing large load customers would not be affected as they already have ongoing contracts, he said.

“We’re not trying to put punitive legislation forward on future economic development, I think this is a good balance,” Boles said.

Boles’ measure passed unanimously through the committee and is eligible to be heard on the House floor.

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Oklahoma Voice is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

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How states use purpose-driven innovation and AI to improve accuracy in public programs

Michael Bostian — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0500

As artificial intelligence reshapes the landscape of public programs, state agencies face a pivotal choice: to pursue innovation for its own sake, or to harness technology with a clear purpose to enhance accuracy, efficiency and public trust.

State governments are accelerating the adoption of AI with a clear purpose: to deliver better services, strengthen public trust and achieve measurable outcomes for their residents. They tend to adopt AI pragmatically, ensuring that every step meets rigorous standards for security, compliance and accountability.

Technology vendors that also understand the nuances of effective public programs can help states leverage AI to achieve not only efficiency and modernization goals but also enhance public services and the customer experience.

How AI Improves Accuracy in Government Benefit Programs

At the core of public safety net programs is a straightforward mission: deliver the correct benefits to eligible people in a timely manner. When applied thoughtfully, AI enables programs to provide accurate benefits and reliable services.

One of the most significant values of the pragmatic application of AI is the speed of data analysis across multiple sources, providing insights that humans can then validate and apply. AI tools flag patterns and trends that might otherwise go unnoticed. Agencies allocate resources where they are needed most and identify systemic issues before they escalate.

A practical example is quality assurance automation. Conversation intelligence tools record, transcribe and analyze agent-caller interactions, generating performance scorecards that allow leaders to identify additional coaching and training needs. With greater traceability and explainability, this approach enables the provision of more accurate information to the public and an enhanced customer experience.

For example, AI has transformed the quality assurance process for customer service in Michigan’s Medicaid program. In place of manually reviewing a small sample of calls, a conversation intelligence platform analyzes nearly every call. It auto-transcribes conversations, identifies trends and enables timely coaching and process improvements. The result? AI amplifies human expertise. Agents deliver person-centered customer service, providing accurate information to the public, with measurable and consistent quality.

Why Purpose-Driven Innovation Delivers

The Michigan example shows how AI adoption succeeds when speed is balanced with careful planning. Targeted applications to specific operational areas, incremental scaling and ongoing evaluation reduce risk while delivering sustainable improvements.

Technology alone, though, isn’t enough. Agencies require partners with in-depth domain expertise who understand the intricacies of government programs and are dedicated to pragmatic, human-centered solutions. Speedy applications without substance can backfire. Thoughtful adoption enhances service delivery and generates lasting value.

Explainability and traceability remain essential in a purpose-driven approach. AI-powered solutions must not only produce accurate insights but also enable leaders to understand how those insights are generated, allowing them to decide where they are applied. For example, understanding agent-caller interactions better helps agency leaders identify areas where additional training or workflow improvements are needed. Embedding auditability into AI workflows ensures accountability.

Not Just a Strategy, but a Commitment to Sustainable Progress

As state agencies chart their course with AI, their deliberate and purpose-driven approach is setting the standard for public sector innovation. Success isn’t achieved in isolation. It demands visionary leadership, cross-agency collaboration and technology partners that understand the complexities of public programs.

By keeping mission outcomes and people’s needs at the center of every decision, state agency leaders can ensure that AI adoption is not just a technological upgrade, but a meaningful step toward stronger programs that deliver meaningful customer experiences. The future of government innovation depends on purpose-driven leadership that brings in the right partners and technology solutions.

Michael Bostian is associate managing director of digital government solutions at Maximus.

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