In an era of collapsing public trust in institutions, many Americans are left asking who really governs us and if perpetual dysfunction is the new normal. Can America’s heritage of self-government be restored, or is that legacy just another high-water mark in the history of the West?

In his essay “AI, Governance, and Our ‘Utopian’ Future,” Charles T. Rubin wonders what kind of political framework is motivating federal DOGE efforts and what direction Trump’s presidency portends for America. The concerns Rubin raises reinforce America’s divisions and anxiety over national issues, driven by real disagreements, but increasingly fueled by the dysfunction of our federal government. 

Recent Gallup polling offers both good and bad news: while trust in Congress remains dismal, confidence in local government is twice as high at 67 percent. There are many reasons for the disparity, but Virginia statesman John Randolph’s observation remains an essential truth: “Government to be safe and to be free must consist of representatives having a common interest and a common feeling with the represented.”

Paralyzed by partisan tribalism and an unwillingness to face our unsustainable spending, Washington feels more distant than ever. Americans feel powerless and disconnected from both the political process and the communities that once shaped their civic identity. Calvin Coolidge offers us a warning from a century ago: “Once the evasion of local responsibilities becomes a habit, there is no knowing how far the consequences may reach.” Thankfully, that erosion can be reversed, especially if we embrace the bottom-up model of liberty that animated America’s founding. There is a pressing need to revive both a love of place and a commitment for individuals and families to have a greater say in shaping their communities.

Surprisingly, one tool for helping us reflect on that model may come from a sector often viewed with suspicion: artificial intelligence. AI is often associated with the loss of human control to machines, cue the plot of “Terminator 2.” But what if, instead, it could reconnect citizens with their government, particularly the elected officials in their community? Offering a more optimistic view than Rubin’s essay, Taylor Barkley of the Abundance Institute asks us to put away our science fiction glasses and embrace AI as a tool for freedom.

Paul Allen, founder of Geneology.com, thinks it can be this way and launched CitizenPortal.ai in 2023. The program has quickly become a treasure trove of information that monitors public governmental meetings from all over the nation, giving unprecedented access so citizens can act as watchdogs over their government. Furthermore, users can tailor their content to keep track of local meetings and comments.

As Allen explained in an interview last year, “The goal of Citizen Portal AI is to take every public meeting in the United States, from the city, county, state, and federal level, transcribe and index every word and then give citizens a powerful search engine, but also keyword alerts so whenever a topic comes up in your local school board or city council or your state legislator that affects your life, you can be alerted about it and go into that moment of that meeting and find out what’s going on.”

He admits that while hurdles and distractions are working against increased engagement in the public square, a skepticism shared by the author, he sees cause for optimism. If Citizen Portal AI can make it easier and more engaging for millions of Americans to participate in public life, he believes the balance of power can begin to shift back toward an informed and active citizenry. As Michael J. Reitz of the Mackinac Center points out, Citizen Portal AI could eventually make the slow and frustrating FOIA process obsolete, giving people direct, searchable access to what their government is doing.

Allen envisions citizens becoming their own “Fourth Estate,” given the death of local media that once championed aggressive coverage of local government. With the decline of local media, more and more Americans have become passive spectators of incessant national noise from talking heads on their screens, not to mention the army of “professional” social media influencers more interested in attention and sowing discord over civic health. Still, there is hope in the rise of a citizen-powered Fourth Estate—driven less by stale and entrenched social media wars but rather by the energy of podcasts, Substacks, and new technologies being employed to demand accountability at the local level.

Synthesizing and searching legislation is one of the obvious ways citizens are empowered through AI. Mountain States Policy Center has released WONK, which can quickly discern and explain to residents the particulars of any state bills introduced in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, or Washington. State residents can ask WONK questions about the legislation, and it can spit back answers without the individual trying to make guesses about bills likely written in an often hard-to-comprehend legal language.

“AI will change the way the world works, and we believe it can be used for the better,” MSPC President Chris Cargill said in a press release. “WONK will quickly become an indispensable tool for those who care about the legislative process.” As more people interact with WONK, its ability to improve its precision and clarity in responses to questions is an upside of machine learning, helping to close the gap between residents who might feel overwhelmed by policy experts or the complexities of the legislative process. Perhaps most importantly, it can simply explain how a bill might directly impact their lives.

The James Madison Institute in Florida and the Buckeye Institute in Ohio are two policy groups that are showing how AI can improve the quality of healthcare outcomes and streamline government inefficiencies, while reminding policymakers of the importance of improving safeguards for the privacy protection of residents.

One of the most promising examples of artificial intelligence empowering state-led reform comes from Ohio’s use of an AI tool called Reg Explorer. As City Journal notes, the software is central to the state’s Common Sense Initiative, an effort to eliminate 30 percent of Ohio’s regulations by 2025. Led by Lt. Gov. Jon Husted, the initiative tasks Reg Explorer with reviewing hundreds of years of state rules and regulations, identifying outdated, redundant, or overly burdensome provisions. A small team of government staff then manually evaluates the AI’s recommendations and collaborates with agency experts to update the code. So far, the project has flagged 2 million unnecessary words and 900 obsolete rules, eliminated 600,000 words from the building code, and is projected to save $44 million and 58,000 labor hours by 2033.

“AI can do what it would take human beings years to do,” Husted told City Journal, emphasizing how the tool is enabling a “culture of reform” once thought impossible. This state-driven initiative offers a powerful model for how AI can modernize government while preserving transparency and accountability—something Washington and many national politicians would be wise to emulate instead of doubling down on rallies in defense of the bureaucratic status quo.

Ohio’s Reg Explorer is an alternative view to Rubin’s essay that warns against the machines making “governance obsolete” or disappearing altogether, instead empowering human employees and the people’s representatives to better serve the public. Concerns about a technocratic utopia are just as probable, if not more so, without the use of AI to push back against the stale forces of bureaucracy, forever alienating people from their government. 

While Rubin points to legitimate concerns with AI supplanting our attempts at self-government, there is strong evidence that in the right hands, it can help to construct bills that are aligned with fidelity to our US and state constitutions. Rubin continually raises valid concerns about the citizenry finding some shared agreements on how to harness AI, but living in a democratic republic already implies having faith in our neighbors to govern themselves, and hopefully moving towards the strengthening of our constitutional norms against the centralization trend. One such tool, “YesChat has a Constitutional Analysts and Bill Rewriter” feature that focuses on whether legislation is problematic in that area. A quick test of a recent congressional omnibus bill flagged numerous red flags. Here are just a few examples:

• Potential excessive delegation of legislative powers to executive agencies or entities without clear standards.
• Potential for government funding of activities that infringe on free speech or religion.
• Vague delegations of authority to executive agencies could violate the non-delegation doctrine.

Citizen Portal AI offers a similar analyzer. While tools to check legislation for constitutional fidelity are valuable for concerned citizens, they are no substitute for principled constitutional scholars, whose interpretation of the historical text can never be replicated through databases of knowledge or algorithms.

Proponents of the dispersion of power and self-government should be alarmed over the independence of their capitals being increasingly diminished by the allure of federal dollars, as states increasingly morph towards satellite status to national agendas. If AI can be harnessed by legislators to assert a more federalist-minded approach to power by calculating the percentage of a budget from national dollars or the cost of compliance to grants, why shouldn’t it be used to combat federal overreach?

Beyond these applications of AI to governance, the states are taking the lead on governing and regulating artificial intelligence itself in their role as the “laboratories of democracy.” California Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2023 executive order on generative AI (GenAI) states that “GenAI can enhance human potential and creativity but must be deployed and regulated carefully to mitigate and guard against a new generation of risks.”

Responsible AI experts, like Edward Longe of the James Madison Institute, argue that artificial intelligence can empower government agencies to serve residents more effectively by freeing up employees to focus on high-impact work. As Longe puts it, “state lawmakers should be embracing these technologies, not rejecting them.”

State and local governments can lead on AI in an area where Congress has done little and show competency in an important area to improve public trust and goodwill. Lawmakers and the public alike need to elevate legitimate concerns about data privacy, factual errors, and built-in ideological biases so prevalent in many new technologies today. And while people have rights, not the machines, balancing free speech protections for individuals is vital.

Still, the greatest risk of AI is the most obvious: machines can never replace humans. For Christians, this is ingrained in the truth of the Imago Dei: we are made in the image of God: “We are God’s handiwork created in his image, and no representation, regardless of its sophistication, can substitute for true human presence and intention,” says David F. Watson, president of Asbury Theological Seminary. Watson hopes, like others, that the rise of “AI will help to clarify the differences between human life and computerized minds.”

But for the religious or non-religious alike, the uniqueness of the human experience is impossible to ignore when one thinks about the quest to reach for the heavens through Baroque masterpieces or the nuances and complexity of more recent skilled songwriters like Paul Simon or Bob Dylan. In a nod to the human person paired with the arts, Pope Francis reminded us that “in this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity.”

If there is a desire for more human freedom and faithfulness to our founding texts, AI can play a complementary role. But like any tool, its emergence is a powerful reminder of what the American founders emphasized from the beginning: the need for virtuous leaders and a morally minded citizen. Still, much of AI’s future use or abuse is up to all of us, reflecting Jefferson’s conviction in “Notes on the State of Virginia,” stating that the people are the “ultimate guardians of their own liberty.”

Federalism is invigorated through AI, given that it’s refreshing to see states and localities taking the lead on an important and likely transformative issue. Certainly, it’s vital—and a test of our capacity for self-government—that more of the hard conversations happen at the governmental levels closer to the people. AI has the potential to strengthen the foundations of our republic by helping to return more power to localities and people, and any tools that can rekindle the self-governing society should be harnessed, given all the powerful forces continually clamoring for more distant and centralized decision-making.